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Katie Mitchell on making Waves

September 23, 2008

katie-mitchell.jpgOn embarking on her multimedia version of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves director Katie Mitchell was warned that she was committing career suicide. After garnering rave reviews and a sell-out run at the National Theatre, Mitchell can rest assured that her gamble has paid off.

Waves was the first foray into the multimedia techniques which she has since explored in productions such as …some trace of her and Attempts on Her Life at the National. There is no safety net; all the footage is live, as are the music and sound effects.  A simple story lies at the heart of Waves, that of six friends brought up together in a nursery in St Ives who forge friendships that last their entire lives.

Mitchell’s admiration for Woolf is evident: “Woolf can appear like a frightening writer but she’s very insightful and tender about human experience and perception, she’s very precise and careful.”  The novel, and consequently the production focus on internal experiences.

Katie elaborates: “The six friends are just a very ordinary group of people, nothing special, or so it appears on the surface, but actually when using the video and sound we go inside their heads and we realise how extraordinary they are.”

Mitchell’s production brings the audience as close as possible to the characters and their story: “The camera allows every member of the audience to see very fine acting close-up. You can see every flicker of every thought and emotion on the 2000 muscles on the actor’s face.”

Whereas, “normally, by the fourth or fifth row you don’t see the detail of an actor’s face.” This privileged access to the actors and their performances combines with cinematic point-of-view shots to allow identification with the characters.  Mitchell believes that it is this unique proximity that explains the show’s popularity amongst seasoned theatre goers:  “it’s such a treat; you get to see them close-up, everyone in the theatre does.”

Woolf wrote the novel which she herself described as a ‘playpoem’ in 1931, Waves’ theatrical incarnation is resolutely 21st century, as Mitchell explains:

“The world has now changed. A lot of information comes to us in very different packaging: internet; cinema; advertising and the tempo and the structure of our lives has altered how we receive information and theatre needs to reflect that.”

Has she inadvertently created the perfect show for the sound bite generation?

“Any young person would really enjoy it.  It’s very fast-moving, pacy, from dance to acting to video to sound.  It’s like a radio play for a bit, then a section of short film, then tap dancing.”

Indeed, Mitchell recalls her initial surprise at the huge following Waves attracted amongst young people. She was shocked to be approached by a group of teenagers while queuing for a gallery and told of their re-creation of Waves’ multimedia staging in a garage.

However, she soon realised that: “For younger people it’s everything they’ve ever dreamed of in terms of video.  If you’ve ever wanted to make a film, use a video camera, and see it executed really interestingly this is the thing to see. It is state of the art work in terms of use of video.”

Mitchell enthuses about the pervasive quality of the piece and: “how amazing it is to use all of the elements of live performance be it video, sound, acting or beautiful language to truthfully portray what it is like to be alive and to be experiencing an event in your life. To do it really accurately, not with fake conventional gestures but as it really is experienced.”

This allows the re-creation of defining moments in the characters’ internal lives:  “Woolf called them moments of being, acute moments where we realise something has changed and that life will never be the same again.  You can be doing something incredibly banal and something enormous happens in your head and no-one can see it.”

On average four to six actors are representing one character at these moments “so one is doing their thoughts, the other is their face, the other is their hands, the other is the sound of them eating.”  This liberates the actors so that they are able “to capture more accurately experience, perception and behaviour than a play could.”

Mitchell cites the examples of sound changing on hearing bad news and of time appearing to slow down during a car crash. Periods from the 1893 to 1933 are evoked with meticulous attention to detail.  Each time we visit the characters, the historical setting has changed and is conveyed via costume, make-up, props and myriad other details right down to the actors’ fingernails.

Because the production does not rely on elaborate sets it can jump across time very quickly and completely.  Moments of hilarity and joy pepper the piece, whether the risqué banana-eating sequence or the tap-dancing interludes.

In her staging of Waves Mitchell has honoured Woolf’s vision and blurred the boundaries between art forms and created a compelling blueprint for a possible future direction of theatre.

Waves opens tonight (Tuesday 23rd September) and plays until Saturday 27th September at the Lowry.

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