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(RE)DIRECTING THE TEXT Politics & Perception in the Work of Katie Mitchell & Thomas Ostermeier BY BENJAMIN BRYNMOR FOWLER A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English & Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick Department of English & Comparative Literary Studies June 2015 CONTENTS Abstract . 5 Preface . 6 Introduction . 7 Chapter 1: From Idea Structure to Embodied Constellation: Katie Mitchell & Chekhov . 35 Chapter 2: Weaponising the Classics: Thomas Ostermeier & Ibsen . 79 Chapter 3: Creating Continuity out of Fragmentation: Katie Mitchell’s Live Cinema Work . 126 Chapter 4: A Synaesthesia of Eye and Ear: Sense and Sensuality in Thomas Ostermeier’s Shakespeares . 178 Conclusion . 229 Select Chronology: Katie Mitchell . 242 Select Chronology: Thomas Ostermeier . 243 Appendix . 244 Bibliography . 245 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to my supervisor Professor Tony Howard for his tireless enthusiasm, his friendship, and for being such an empowering force. Professor Carol Rutter has lent me her unfailing support and her critical eye throughout this process, for which I am equally grateful. Thanks are also due to Professor Kim Solga for her warm encouragement and her helpful comments on sections of this thesis, and Dr Andy Kesson, who has been a valued mentor. I’d also like to thank Laura Wood and Mary Addyman for being considerate readers and faithful friends. I’d like to give Katie Mitchell my thanks for sharing her thoughts and her hard-pressed time with generosity, and for inviting me to watch rehearsals. Thanks also to Hattie Morahan and Paul Ready, who gave me enormous insight into their craft as actors. Special thanks go to Tom, whose love and support never faltered, and who helped me out of some of the labyrinths where I would remain lost were it not for his insight. 3 DECLARATION This thesis is my own work; no part of it has been submitted for a degree at another university. No part of the thesis has been published elsewhere. 4 ABSTRACT This thesis investigates the practice of two contemporary theatre directors. Thomas Ostermeier in Germany, and Katie Mitchell in Britain, have forged careers that have brought them recognition across Europe, and Mitchell is now a regular guest director at Ostermeier’s Schaubühne theatre in Berlin. Crossing cultural borders, their work affords the opportunity to investigate national discourses and compare critical trends. This thesis considers their trajectories over the last twenty years, from their training in a newly unified Europe through to prestigious invitations to bring their mature work to national and international festivals. More importantly, it argues that these are directors whose creativity remains rooted in the literary and dramatic canon. At every turn their innovations have been stimulated by new textual sources, prompting them to develop work that investigates politics, gendered subjectivities and issues of form. Examining their uses of Chekhov and Ibsen to probe questions of perception and cognition, this thesis tracks their developing interest in consciousness. Whereas Ostermeier focused his exploration using early modern text (Shakespeare), Mitchell used the modernist literary novel (Virginia Woolf) as the basis of an intermedial reinvention of form. Through the close analysis of key productions, this thesis explores issues of production as well as reception. It investigates why their particular uses of text and technology have bemused or antagonised critics and scholars, and interrogates their commitment to drama, to realist praxis, and to modernist concerns in a cultural moment where postdrama and the postmodern predominate. Although these are practitioners committed to the investigation of interests that many regard as untimely, this thesis argues that the reactionary, in their hands, is the radical. 5 PREFACE All translations of foreign material (scripts, reviews, journals and critical sources) cited in my text are my own; the original citations are given in the Bibliography. A Select Chronology for each director is included at the end of this thesis, before the Bibliography. It includes details of all productions that serve as case studies. Original production titles are used throughout, and where necessary an English translation is provided in brackets only on a first appearance within a chapter. I have attended at least one live performance of each of the productions that serve as my case studies. The only exceptions to this are Thomas Ostermeier’s Wunschkonzert (2003) and his Richard III (2015). For these, as for the other productions discussed, I have consulted archive recordings. All production dialogue quoted in my analysis is sourced from rehearsal scripts sent to me by the theatres, and where there are discrepancies between a script and an archive recording I have followed the latter, providing my own translations in brackets. Where there is an English source text (i.e. Shakespeare), I have included the line being translated as a footnote. Andrew Dickson (2011a; 2013a) kindly passed on unpublished transcripts of his interviews with Thomas Ostermeier, which I make considerable use of in Chapter 4. I’d also like to thank Irma Zwernemann (Schaubühne) and Michaela Predeick (Schauspiel Köln) for giving me access to archive recordings, and Tina Steinmueller (Schaubühne) for sending me scripts. Any references to (Ostermeier 2014) relate to his keynote at the symposium “Reinventing Directors’ Theatre”, held in honour of Ostermeier’s work at the CSSD (September 2014), and in which I participated. (Ostermeier 2011b) and (“The Big Swap” 2013) refer to personal appearance events at the Goethe-Institut in London where I was in attendance. I participated in a five day Directing Workshop led by Katie Mitchell at the Jerwood Space in London (June 2005), and draw on my own notes from that event in Chapter 1. As a student on the Theatre Directing MA at Birkbeck, I participated in a series of design workshops led by Vicki Mortimer in Autumn 2008, and include some references from my notes in Chapter 3. I also watched three days of Mitchell’s rehearsals for Die Gelbe Tapete in Berlin (February 2013). Any references to (Mitchell 2012) refer to my own conversation with the director on 4th September at the Jerwood Space, London. Any references to (Morahan 2014) refer to personal correspondence with the actor Hattie Morahan. I also conducted an interview with the actor Paul Ready (December 2011). 6 INTRODUCTION Katie Mitchell and Thomas Ostermeier are dedicated to text as the essential foundation of their work. As a statement regarding directors who are frequently labelled “auteurs”, their work viewed as a continuous projection of self, this perhaps sounds surprising. It also appears to be out of step with contemporary theoretical performance trends, of which Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre (2006 [1999]) is a prominent example. In privileging work that facilitates the reflexivity of the spectator, Lehmann’s theory devalued narrative and realism in avant-garde theatre, preferring to locate its politics at the junction between formal disruption and spectatorial difficulty. Celebrating “the future of theatre after drama” (2006 [1999]: 56), he cornered the market in theatrical innovation with a form of practice defined by its ability to shatter “a comprehensible narrative and/or mental totality” (ibid: 21), a totality he associated with the dramatic text.1 An analysis of Mitchell and Ostermeier – directors whose work is grounded in a studied engagement with text – affords the opportunity to consider what a dramatic theatre looks like in the twenty-first century, raising important questions as to why the postdramatic is the current paradigm for political performance. Picking up on this interest in the postdramatic and its uses, Stephen Bottoms edited a special 2010 issue of Performance Research dealing with the subject of “Performing 1 Lehmann argued that the “dramatic” paradigm had required that “what we perceive in the theatre can be referred to a ‘world’, i.e. to a totality” (2006 [1999]: 22), often linked to the primacy of a dramatic text. In contrast, what Lehmann called “radical staging practice” (i.e. postdramatic theatre) “problematizes its status of illusory reality” (ibid: 17). For the “politics” of this form of perception, see Lehmann’s concluding remarks in the epilogue, (ibid: 184-7), which are discussed on p. 102 of this thesis. 7 Literatures”. He argued: “In UK theatre and performance studies at least, our attempts to emphasize the centrality of the live performance event in our research have resulted in a situation whereby a largely reflexive disinterest in dramatic literature and theatre history has become the new orthodoxy” (2010: 2). In Germany, where the postdramatic developments articulated by Lehmann reflect mainstream practice as well as academic enterprise, the situation is more extreme; although playfully overstating his outsider status, Thomas Ostermeier registered a genuine sense of alienation when he quipped that his was “the only dramatic theatre [left] in Berlin. The rest is post-dramatic” (Florin & Meidal 2012). Indeed, this thesis argues that the ostensible untimeliness of Mitchell and Ostermeier’s interest in drama, in variants of realism, and in text more widely is in fact what makes them timely. Through their sustained investigations of Chekhov and Ibsen respectively, they have reclaimed and reinvested the avant-garde impulses that energised realism and naturalism as those theatrical forms emerged in the late nineteenth century.