Berlin art notes

At  Schaubuehne

after August Strindberg
Direction: Katie Mitchell and Leo Warner (ca. 85 min.)

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Where does the rest of the text come from?

There’s some poetry by Inger Christensen, who is a contemporary Danish poet. I love the idea of putting Strindberg, the great misogynist, together with feminist poetry.

How different is your Miss Julie ‘remix’ to the original play?

The basic idea is that when you watch Miss Julie normally, in a normal production, or even in an abnormal production, you’re always looking at it in a wide shot, in film terms. But cinematic subjectivity is not really possible in theatre, so here we’ve taken one character, the least significant character – the maid, Christine – and we’re telling the story through her eyes. Which means that, when she falls asleep, the action of the play stops and we go into her dreams...

We’re doing the play from the point of view of the least important character and, you know, it’s very moving to watch the main action through the eyes of a person who is actually going to be really, profoundly affected by the action, but who the two protagonists don’t really care about. It’s like us in life, really. These grand dramas play out, but there’s a lot of collateral damage. There’s amazing damage to this woman’s life: this was the man she loved, her fiancé, the man she was going to spend the rest of her life with, and in one evening all that is irrevocably destroyed. And she just watches the dismantling of her entire future, second by second, while these careless people don’t even think about her.

...

So the production’s development has been driven by the filming?

It was totally led by the film output. You can watch the scenes played in the kitchen, live, but you can also watch the film. You get the normal theatrical reality: there is the Swedish kitchen, they’re all in period costumes, they’re all acting out the scene. But the film shows the point of view of the person falling asleep in the corner [laughs], so it’s all very interesting...

If you’re into film, you’re really going to love it. And if you like the play, it will challenge your understanding of what a play is!

How has your idea of what a play can or should be changed over the course of your career?

For me, at the heart of everything is an attempt, maybe a pretty foolhardy attempt, to capture and crystallize how we experience ourselves in our environment – the very fragile, tiny, delicate strands of our perceptions – and to try to do that very accurately, so that it’s very respectful to life. Film enables you to do that so delicately and precisely: you see those little movements of your little finger.

Very often in life, the enormous events are not big royal pageants...the enormous events are when at breakfast, with two people who’ve been married for years and years, one person stretches out their hand and the other just removes it… and in that moment the world changes for those two people.

-- quoted from http://www.exberliner.com/reviews/an-interview-with-katie-mitchell