For the past two decades, Katie Mitchell has been thrilling and unsettling
audiences with innovative interpretations of literary classics. Her methods
are meddlesome, interventionist, her role, it has been commented, often more
that of an auteur than a director. She has experimented widely with form and
technique, toying with slowed-down action, prolonged movements, a focus on
dance (inspired by Pina Bausch), film intrusions and disquieting
soundscapes. In her stripped-down version of The Seagull, adapted from
Chekhov by Martin Crimp, she brought in tango moves and microphones. The
play received its plaudits, but was not universally loved. “I had no idea
that it would make people angry”, said Mitchell. Her production of Ted
Hughes’s Oresteia was kitted out with gadgets (a cassette player; a video
screen; an intercom), and her various takes on the plays of Euripides have
been improvisatory (the point being that the originals developed in this
way) and unabashedly anachronistic (the Second World War; Blair’s Iraq; the
1990s Balkans conflict; the future).
A couple of years ago, Mitchell went even further by inventing a whole new
form. A marriage between film and theatre (featre?), her method was
ingenious: in “adapting” Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, Mitchell and her
company suspended a large screen at the back of the stage, splitting the
action into a horizontal diptych. The movements on stage were then filmed
from different angles in close-up and played out on the screen above. One
actor would read the words, another perform the actions and a third create
sound effects. The result was disorientating, disjointed – some said
alienating – and fluid in a manner that Woolf might have approved of; a
feast of sensory impressions. Waves, self-consciously minus the definite
article, made waves. The production recalled Woolf’s invocation in The Art
of Fiction: “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind”. It is
being revived at the National Theatre this month.
In . . . some trace of her, Mitchell and her company have raised the stakes
again. Their technique has been revived, this time with Dostoevsky’s novel
The Idiot (1868) as the fabric. In a sense, tackling Dostoevsky seems an
appropriate development, his fiction being filled promisingly with feverish
sense impressions, and impulsive, zealous, often mentally unstable
characters. (The Idiot, of course, has an epileptic as its centre.) But he
is perhaps less suited to distortion by Mitchell’s technique than Woolf.
Dostoevsky also has plot, and wonderful setpieces, and Mitchell is at risk
of stripping him of these.
As in Waves, the set (designed by Vicki Mortimer) is messily naked. The
equipment is visible – microphones, cameras, lights, wires. Sound engineers
crouch in the corners, as if ready to pounce. Shelves framing both sides of
the stage house changes of costume. This is inside-out theatre, gutted and
exposed like a Modernist novel or a “bowellist” Richard Rogers building. We
feel as though we are backstage, or in a cutting room, sometimes a dark
room, or a grubby backstreet clinic. Prince Myshkin lies on a doctor’s
table, the close-up on screen revealing a jumble of glass bottles and
electronic equipment around him. A voice is heard, then another: “I want
truth . . . . I want peace”. Other items on the metaphysical shopping list
include enlightenment, good health and time. Mystified, we persevere. “I
want him to leave her alone”, we finally hear. Ah ha, we think, that must be
Nastasya Filippovna they are talking about.
The actors take turns performing and speaking (from scripts or from memory);
sometimes they speak and act at the same time, their voices amplified
through microphones. They also help out with the cameras. The score (by Paul
Clark) is played out on stage by musicians, violins, viola and cello
broodily denoting the relevant passions and bustling activity. Sound
effects, layered over the action, are created using the “Foley” technique.
Foley artists – also called footsteppers – are the people who record
enhanced effects in the sound studio after the production has been edited: a
sheet of metal for thunder, coconuts for horse hooves. When a character
mimes running up the stairs, another creates the noise on a board. This,
like everything else, is distracting; it is supposed to be.
Myshkin and Rogozhin are sitting in a train carriage. Their crude
representations of motion-induced jolting on stage look surprisingly
effective on the monochrome screen above. This goes for the production as a
whole. The theatre element is disordered, makeshift, the filmic one almost
parodically stylized, soft-focus, hazily pleasing to look at. When water is
rudely squirted on a pane of glass to denote rain, it really looks like rain
on screen. When two actors engage in conversation below, they sit yards
apart from each other, facing different directions, fixed on the middle
distance; but up above, with the benefit of different camera angles,
close-ups and split-screen, they appear to be immersed in each other, giving
their full concentration. As a metaphor for alienation, this is pleasing.
Gradually, the bare skeleton of Dostoevsky’s novel takes shape. The Idiot
revolves around Nastasya Filippovna and the various forms of “love”
expressed for her by (among others) the saintly Prince Myshkin (Christian),
the intense Rogozhin (passionate/homicidal) and the cynical Ganya (venal).
“I loved her because I pitied her”, whimpers the excellent Ben Whishaw as
the Prince, in a convincingly reedy voice. “I’ll marry her for the money and
then I’ll wipe the floor with her afterwards”, whispers Ganya. “Perhaps
he’ll marry her one week and murder her the next”, postulates the Prince of
Rogozhin. “I have almost ceased to exist”, complains Nastasya. Played with
dexterity by Hattie Morahan, at once haughty and disconsolate, Nastasya is
filled with “spite” and “inhuman aversion” – but not for the Prince. “You
are perfection”, she tells him. If only he weren’t. In a scene of manic
power she washes her hands of guilt like Lady Macbeth, murmuring over and
over again, “what am I doing to him?”. When the strain gets too much, Emily
Dickinson is quoted; sometimes the characters slip into associative, scrappy
speech patterns reminiscent of e. e. cummings or Samuel Beckett: “the
sunshine bright the in shining . . . but something or somewhat but he could
it how”.
In flashes, . . . some trace of her is impressive. There is an arresting
episode when Myshkin’s soup transforms into a bowl of maggots on the screen.
The Prince’s seizure, induced by the violent encounter with Rogozhin, is
realized with vigour both on stage and screen, where it verges on Hammer
horror and initially appears to be a realization of the anticipated murder.
There is a lovely moment when a sort of Chekhovian picnic of props is laid
out and then filmed, Nastasya burning Rogozhin’s money on the (fireproof)
rug. There is some thoughtful symbolism. Between changes, an image of a
forest appears above, recalling Myshkin’s idealistic incomprehension that
his fellow mortals “can’t walk past a tree and be happy at the sight of it”.
Leo Warner has performed miracles as director of photography; and so have
the engineers. Filming in real time requires the actors to juggle different
styles: they succeed. Mitchell, moreover, deserves praise for her
inventiveness. We feel – we hope – that she is on to something.
Yet this is far from an absorbing evening. Trapped for ninety minutes before
the featrical rubble, we can’t help wishing that Mitchell were a little less
pioneering and a little bit more captivating. The production does not
represent a mess: it is a mess. For those without prior knowledge of the
novel, . . . some trace of her will be largely impossible to follow. For
those who are familiar with it, the sensual shindig quickly fades into a
broken thread of incidents, leaving the theatregoer little to do but tick
off the episodic checklist: the bit when the characters look at Holbein’s
representation of Christ; the bit when Rogozhin arrives with his drunken
troupe at Nastasya’s party. This is smoke and mirrors – sometimes quite
literally so. We are, it is true, forced to interrogate dramatic
conventions; we are, admittedly, shown exciting things about the nuances and
subjectivity of representation. We are, not, however, required to engage.
Dostoevsky on stage has been denuded of his theatre, and, on screen, denuded
of his brilliant visual power. The psychological underpinnings of his
impetuous protagonists have been sacrificed; the Prince, meanwhile, seems
less mystical in his uncompromising honesty than simply inscrutable. “At
least let me find some trace of her”, he mutters after Nastasya has died.
Ultimately, we are left begging for the same, some remnant of Dostoevsky’s
original.
Toby Lichtig is an editor at the TLS.
