Breaking The Waves

In her native England, director Katie Mitchell is a divider. Some critics and theatergoers hail her formal experiments with texts as bracing and illuminating; others see her as a trendy tinkerer or worse, a high-minded vandal of the classics. Over the years, she has staged authors dead (Chekhov, Strindberg, Euripides) and living (Martin Crimp, Caryl Churchill). Although Nicholas Hytner of London’s National Theatre made Mitchell, 44, an associate director in 2004, journos across the pond still find reason to second-guess her motivations. They ask why she adapted Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot as a fractured, dreamy dance, with actors creating dense cinematic images projected onto screens over the stage unusually titled …some trace of her. (This writer caught it in London two weeks ago.) Is she a “Director or Destroyer?” a Guardian headline coyly asked this summer.

“It’s weird, isn’t it, when you get tagged ‘controversial,’” Mitchell admits by phone from Germany, where she is directing Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Wunschkonzert. “It’s so hard to take that measurement on the inside. My aim is to make very clear and rigorous work. I certainly don’t do it carelessly or without proper research.” New Yorkers can decide for themselves when Mitchell’s video-mediated version of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (which premiered at the National two years ago) plays here for two weeks, courtesy of Lincoln Center. Woolf’s modernist, 1931 stream-of-consciousness novel about six friends spans decades and eschews narrative for disembodied voices: perfect for Mitchell’s stylized vision.

The director has been fascinated by the Woolf text since her university days, but it was only when she started working with video and Foley sound effects that she realized the book could translate: “I thought, maybe if one didn’t do it in a figurative way—if one used technology, sound, light and video—maybe it would be possible to capture its quality… it’s like a series of spiderwebs, really.”

Local spectators should take the dubious British reception with a large grain of salt. First of all, the press over there has a donnish, conservative tendency (classics! texts! tradition!) that it huffily defends. Secondly, experimentation is just not as robust in England. It’s true, they have Complicite, Improbable, Forced Entertainment and Shunt, but these troupes are exceptions to the rule. “Our avant-garde tradition tends to occur in patches, and the work never gets any purchase on mainstream practice,” Mitchell explains. The closest the U.K. has come to a concerted experimental-theater movement in recent history has been the so-called “in-yer-face” school of grungy, seminaturalistic plays (such as Blasted). Mitchell, who combines video, dance and art installation, freely admits that her aesthetic isn’t terribly original. “There’s nothing new in what I make at all,” she says. “I’m really clear about the debt that I owe to Liz LeCompte, the Wooster Group, the Polish avant-garde and British groups of the ’80s such as Hesitate and Demonstrate.”

So cinematic has Mitchell’s work become—with multiple cameras, quick cuts and dazzling (if humbly executed) special effects—that the question arises: Will she, like her countryman Sam Mendes, be wooed by Hollywood? “I’m not a filmmaker,” the director replies emphatically. “Any film person who watched the outputs from our live-created shots…it just wouldn’t sustain itself.”

Waves is at the Duke on 42nd St through Nov 22.