Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Despair … rehearsals for the Royal Opera House’s Lessons in Love and Violence, about Edward II’s relationship with the Earl of Cornwall.
Despair … rehearsals for the Royal Opera House’s Lessons in Love and Violence, about Edward II’s relationship with the Earl of Cornwall. Photograph: Stephen Cummiskey/ROH/Stephen Cummiskey
Despair … rehearsals for the Royal Opera House’s Lessons in Love and Violence, about Edward II’s relationship with the Earl of Cornwall. Photograph: Stephen Cummiskey/ROH/Stephen Cummiskey

Katie Mitchell on ROH's brutal new opera: 'There is optimism – for 10 seconds'

This article is more than 5 years old

Her last production contained cannibalism and was staggeringly successful. Could Lessons in Love and Violence top it? We sit in on rehearsals as the revered director grapples with some Danish bedside lamps

Katie Mitchell is distracted. We’re sitting in the stalls of the Royal Opera House watching various props being wheeled out on to the stage, where a dark-walled, Scandinavian-style bedroom has been created. It’s dominated by a low-frame double bed and features an aquarium built into a wall that’s glowing pink, purple and blue. But Mitchell’s concerns are elsewhere.

“I’m interested in the lamps,” the 53-year-old director tells me, as she surveys the set. “We need to test them. We have two suspended lamps, very Danish in design, but we didn’t have bedside lamps that matched. So I just need to see what their light looks like before rehearsals begin.”

There’s just a fortnight to go until the world premiere of Lessons in Love and Violence, George Benjamin’s new opera, and everything clearly has to be perfect. The project began two years ago, when the ROH commissioned Benjamin and librettist Martin Crimp to write a new work, following the staggering success of their previous collaboration, the chillingly beautiful Written on Skin, a medieval-set story in which the creation of an illuminated manuscript leads to adultery, murder and eventually cannibalism.

‘I’m nervous of spoilers, so I’m being slightly cautious, but it does excavate a sad world’ … Katie Mitchell. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

Yet, while Mitchell directed Written on Skin and is regarded as one of the most important British directors of theatre and opera, she insists it was never a done deal that she’d work on Lessons. “Nothing was agreed,” she says. “As stage director, you’re always the last person to join the party – and you can never make any assumptions you’ll be invited again. But I was delighted when they asked me.”

In the theatrical world, Mitchell is regarded as either a saviour or a vandal, tossing aside narrative conventions to reveal the emotional truth beneath. She is generally painted as a straight-backed, button-down zealot, with little room for humour. Today, however, sipping her morning coffee, she is gently funny and appears genuinely concerned when my Kindle, containing all my questions, starts to die on me. She even allows me to watch some of the dress rehearsal, which the Guardian had previously been told was a no-no.

A reimagining of the life of Edward II and his doomed relationship with Piers Gaveston, the first Earl of Cornwall, the opera is presented as seven troubling lessons, viewed through the eyes of the monarch’s two children. Judging by what I saw, Benjamin’s creation is a work of intense sadness, exquisite beauty and mounting dread that, in its depiction of what absolute power can do to an already broken family unit, seems extremely relevant to the world we’re living in right now.

“It is a brutal piece of work,” agrees Mitchell. “I mean, there’s a shaft of optimism at the end for about 10 seconds. Maybe a little bit more than 10 seconds, but …” She pauses. “I’m nervous of spoilers, so I’m being slightly cautious, but it does excavate a sad world.”

The same could be said of Mitchell’s particular skill as a director. Throughout her 35-year career – particularly in such landmark productions as her 2006 staging of The Seagull, the 2008 adaptation of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s play without words Wunschkonzert, and 2016’s Lucia di Lammermoor – Mitchell has always sought different ways of seeing the action. She ramps up events and accentuates the emotional lives of overlooked characters, while reconstructing the theatrical world for a modern audience.

With Lessons in Love and Violence, Crimp’s libretto was originally set across five locations, including a medieval castle and a dungeon. Fearing multiple sets might dilute the play’s energy, Mitchell had the idea of transferring all the scenes to the king’s bedroom. “I thought that would be a good solution, as it intensifies the action,” she says, “and allows you to look at it from lots of different angles. There’s such a respectful unity in George and Martin’s work. On the opening night of Written on Skin, I sensed what it must have been like to be part of an early Britten opera. Very powerful.”

Chillingly beautiful … Written on Skin. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Inspired by the work of the German choreographer Pina Bausch, as well as Stanislavsky, Mitchell’s productions also place great emphasis on characters’ psychological motivations. On the first day of Lessons’ rehearsals, she and Crimp assembled a detailed biography for all the characters. Mitchell has, in the past, been criticised for such an approach, with certain playwrights doubting the relevance of questions about how many cups of coffee a character has had.

“To me,” says Mitchell, “these biographies are efficient, pragmatic tools to help direct the scene. I find that [sort of criticism] very curious. If you’re playing a queen and you enter the room with a king, it’s useful – in terms of how to play it – to know whether you’ve been married for 10 years or four months. Maybe people criticise it because it’s a different way of thinking about theatre. Maybe some people still want old-fashioned, museum-like animation. You ask yourself, ‘Why do they come to the art form? Do they want to escape reality?’ I don’t know.”

Mitchell is, however, no absolutist. She believes a healthy arts culture should have a spectrum running from very conservative to avant garde, but she also believes her job is to keep opera and theatre “oxygenated”, so that it continues to attract young people, as watchers and makers.

“I spend a lot of time with young people,” says Mitchell, who currently teaches directing at the Royal Holloway University of London, “and I’m really struck by the rage of this generation. They feel very culturally dispossessed. But, while it’s hard for young women to feel there’s a place for them in an old-fashioned, patriarchal art form such as opera, I also speak with a lot of fourth-wave feminists and people within the trans community who are re-examining how we present female experience in opera, an art form where a lot of the conventions are to do with ideas of gender, women dressing as a young boys. You feel that if opera could just open up, breathe, and allow those voices in, it could be a really exciting time.”

One iconic opera Mitchell feels might benefit from such an approach is La Traviata, Verdi’s tragedy about a courtesan who sacrifices herself for love. “It basically takes place in the head of a dying woman,” she says, “and I’ve never quite seen that idea followed through.” However, she also acknowledges that the freedom to raise such questions of representation is tied up in how institutions such as the Royal Opera House operate.

“A young women entering a hierarchical practice will find it very difficult to articulate that vision,” she says. “For me, the privilege of being long-in-the-tooth is that I can gently have those conversations. But I do think Oliver Mears [ROH’s director of opera] is a trailblazer. He has an appetite for change, which is good.”

She trails off, then looks up at the stage. “Ah, the light’s gone on!” Is that what you were waiting to see? “Yes,” she says, with a smile on her face. “There’s a conceptual idea I can’t tell you about yet – and I don’t know whether we’ll achieve it. But, if it comes off, it will crystallise the material in a rigorous way. And it all depends on that new light. Isn’t that exciting?”

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed