...[W]e shouldn’t fall into the trap of equating “new work” with “new writing” (although it’s a bit of a strain to maintain the distinction to the extent of giving the Olivier Award for Best New Musical to the 2011 stage adaptation of a 1935 movie musical, Top Hat).  The vast majority of the productions covered here are “new work” in the sense of being either simply new productions or of taking a new approach to a piece.


Katie Mitchell’s Fräulein Julie may be considered an example of the latter category, though not by me.  She has made a number of deconstructive stage productions before, and this one is scarcely any more extreme or rigorous than any of those.  It was, however, the first example of this strain of her work to be produced in Germany, at the Schaubühne in Berlin, where its 2010 opening was generally praised.  Though, again, not by me.

As in Mies Julie, Yael Farber’s South African version currently running at the Riverside Studios, Mitchell and Maja Zade’s adaptation of Strindberg acts in part as a corrective against the raw deal given to Kristin the maid, the third point of the play’s love triangle.  Here we see her conducting Midsummer night rituals to invoke her beloved Jean, eavesdropping on the others’ exchanges from behind the door or through the floor of her bedroom, and generally leading a life of quiet desperation.


In fact, Kristin is not merely in the foreground, but everywhere else as well, often simultaneously.  Jule Böwe may busy herself behind the windows of the servants’ parlour upstage whilst, in an audio booth at the side of the stage, Cathlen Gawlich recites her interior monologue; downstage right, her hand actions may be performed in detail for close-up shots at a table, whilst down left, live sound effects are added at another.  All the components are mixed by co-director Leo Warner into a live video feed on a screen above the action.  Everything is rigorously thought out and tightly marshalled (except for occasional glitches such as a wrong camera shot on the Berlin press night which showed us cellist Chloe Miller getting into position), but I am afraid it remains as pointless to me as when I first saw it.

For here is the crux of Mitchell’s reinventions of theatre: what happens when they are in fact anti-theatrical – not merely in the sense of being occasionally subversive, but when they harden into a pattern of practice which suggests a disdain for the core elements of theatre?  What kind of theatre is it that restores the fourth wall, so that – some windows notwithstanding – we can only properly see the live action onscreen?  If we are to see sound and music being added live, where is the consistency in also using pre-recorded elements?  If those sound effects are obtained simply by doing exactly what is being done by the performers, why not mike up the stage instead?  Above all, if the point is to show us how even a supposedly live theatrical experience is mediated, what is the point of that when it goes so far as to render the actual play chosen almost incidental?  These aren’t rhetorical questions; they need to be answered in some form, or at least addressed, either by the production itself or by its champions.  And they’re not.

Written for Theatre Record.