Introduction to a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review (30.2) on the director Katie Mitchell.

This article explores the work of European theatre director Katie Mitchell (1964-) by examining her approach to managing the technologies of the realist theatre. It borrows from Heidegger’s analysis of the nature of technology to build upon Ric Knowles’s materialist account of theatre as an ‘ideologically-coded process’ of generating ‘overwh…[Read more]

This chapter explores the life, work and legacy of the Anglo-Irish theatre director Tyrone Guthrie, with a particular focus on the UK and North America. It argues that Guthrie originated the model of the hybrid artistic, entrepreneurial and bureaucratic figure of the Artistic Director, which came to dominate the Anglophone theatre in the second…[Read more]

Book Review

This lecture/essay uses Sara Ahmed’s conception of ‘willfulness’ to consider the repeated accusations, levelled by critics against director Katie Mitchell, of ‘auteurism’ and productions whose effect is ‘distracting’. It argues, via a close analysis of Mitchell’s productions of three canonical works for the stage – Donizetti’s opera Lucia di…[Read more]

This chapter argues that Michael Chekhov’s work is incompletely understood unless we consider him as both an actor and a director and as a theorist not only of acting but of theatre more widely. It offers an overview of his directorial work and analyses his directorial process, from which it derives some exercises for use in the rehearsal room.

This short article responds to a notorious incidence of racism in a British theatre review from 2018 to argue that diversity initiatives in the British theatre have failed to challenge the assumptions of white supremacy at the level of narrative and discourse and have thereby not only acted as a fig-leaf for systemic racism, but have actively sustained it.

This essay takes as its starting-point the post-2016 Refugee Crisis, which it considers to have been caused not so much by unmanageable migration as by excessive border control. It then uses Julia Kristeva’s figures of the ‘abject’ and ‘deject’ and Tim Ingold’s related conceptions of ‘containment’ and ‘exposure’ to explore some ways in which borde…[Read more]

This essay proposes practical engagement with archived materials as a model for the director’s creative process, a process which also considers the play as a form of archival record: that the play-text is itself an archive of its own world. That archive, the article suggests, can be supplemented by historical research and interpreted with…[Read more]

This chapter explores Michael Chekhov’s acting technique, and particularly the idea of the ‘invisible body’, as a dialogue between the concrete and the spiritual.

In this article Tom Cornford examines the policy of extending and adapting the permanent stage of Shakespeare’s Globe for each new production, as pursued by Dominic Dromgoole since the beginning of his tenure as Artistic Director in 2006. The article responds initially to John Russell Brown’s equation in NTQ 102 of a particular kind of…[Read more]

In this article, Tom Cornford reflects on his experience of using approaches derived from Michael Chekhov’s artistic technique to direct Shakespeare’s plays. His account is contextualised with references to Chekhov’s own writings and illustrated with examples of exercises developed specifically to address the challenges of finding a contemporary…[Read more]

Dartington Hall, which was the home of the Chekhov Theatre Studio between 1936 and 1938, also accommodated other performing artists including the Ballets Jooss and Hans Oppenheim’s music school as well as artist-craftsmen such as the painter Mark Tobey, the potter Bernard Leach and the sculptor Willi Soukop. This essay examines the training…[Read more]

In his epilogue to this special issue’s collection of essays on early modern drama and realism, Tom Cornford returns to Stanislavsky’s studio and to the practices which gave rise to his “System.” This approach is often cited as the means by which realism came to dominate the aesthetics of theater-making in the last hundred years, and yet, as Corn…[Read more]

Training in a Cold Climate was a roundtable event that took place at the University of Leeds on 30 October 2013. The event was conceived as an adjunct to this special issue and its aim was to open up a space in which those involved in training, as students, educators, scholars and practitioners, could discuss, contest and challenge the present…[Read more]

Review of The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier by Peter Boenisch and Thomas Ostermeier and Directing Scenes and Senses: The Thinking of Regie by Peter Boenisch