Katie Mitchell

Katrina Jane Mitchell (born 23 September 1964) is an English theatre director.

Mitchell was born in Reading, Berkshire, raised in Hermitage, Berkshire, and educated at Oakham School.

Upon leaving Oakham, she went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read English.

She began her career behind the scenes at the King's Head Theatre in London before taking on work as an assistant director at theatre companies including Paines Plough (1987) and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) (1988 - 1989).

In 1989, she was awarded a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship to study director’s training in Russian, Georgia, Lithuania and Poland and the work she saw there, including productions by Lev Dodin, Eimuntas Nekrosius and Anatoly Vasiliev, influenced her own practice for the next twenty years.

Early in her career in the 1990s, she directed five early productions under the umbrella of her company Classics On A Shoestring, including Women of Troy for which she won a Time Out Award.

In 1996, Mitchell started directing operas at Welsh National Opera where she directed four productions, including Handel's Jephtha and Jancek's Jenůfa.

Since then, she has directed operas at houses, including the Royal Opera House, English National Opera, Glyndebourne, the Salzburg Festival, Berlin State Opera, the Royal Danish Opera, Opéra-Comique (Paris), Geneva Opera and the Aix-en-Provence Festival.

Mitchell was an Associate Director at the Royal Shakespeare Company between 1996 and 1998.

While at the RSC she directed nine productions, including The Phoenician Women which won her the Evening Standard Award for Best Director in 1996.

In 1997, Mitchell became responsible for programming at The Other Place, the RSC's former black box theatre.

Between 2000 and 2003 she was an Associate Director at the Royal Court Theatre and between 2003 and 2011 she was an Associate of the Royal National Theatre.

She regularly involves psychiatry in looking at characters, and in 2004 directed a series of workshops on Stanislavski and neuroscience at the NT studio.

Since her 2006 play Waves, she has also experimented with video projections in a number of productions.

In 2007, the artistic director of the NT accused the British press of affording Mitchell's productions "misogynistic reviews, where everything they say is predicated on her sex".

Her productions have been described as "distinguished by the intensity of the emotions, the realism of the acting, and the creation of a very distinctive world" and accused of "a willful disregard for classic texts", but Mitchell suggests that while "there's a signature in every director's work", it is not her intent to work to a "strong personal signature".

At the beginning of her career, Mitchell's process involved long and intensive rehearsal periods and use of Stanislavski's system.

From 2008, Mitchell started working regularly on mainland Europe in Germany, Holland, France, Denmark and Austria.

Her first production for the Cologne Schauspielhaus, Wunschkonzert, earned her a place at the Theatertreffen in Berlin and since then she has directed four productions for the Cologne Schauspielhaus, seven for the Schaubühne Theatre, Berlin, and six for the Hamburg Schauspielhaus.

She has also worked at the Toneelgroep, Amsterdam, and twice at the Bouffes du Nord, Paris.

She is a resident director at the Schaubühne Theatre, Berlin, the Hamburg Schauspielhaus and had a seven-year artist-in-residency at the Aix-en-Provence Festival.

She also published two books based on her live cinema productions – …some trace of her and Waves, both in 2008.

Mitchell has also directed installations, including Five Truths at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

In 2009, Mitchell published The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre (Routledge), her practical manual to help emerging directors learn how to direct.

In 2011 The Department of Theatre and Performance at the V&A invited Mitchell and Leo Warner of 59 Productions to conceive and produce a video installation exploring the nature of 'truth in performance'.

Taking as its inspiration 5 of the most influential European theatre directors of the last century, the project examines how each of the practitioners would direct the actress playing Ophelia in the 'mad' scenes in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

This multiscreen video installation, launched at the Chantiers Europe festival at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris on 4 June, and opened at the V&A on 12 July 2011.

In a career spanning thirty years, Mitchell has directed over 100 shows - over 70 theatre productions and nearly 30 operas.

She is currently a Professor of Theatre Directing at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she teaches on an MA in directing.

Other academic positions include:

Mitchell has been described as "a director who polarises audiences like no other" and "the closest thing the British theatre has to an auteur".

She has directed thirteen productions for the Royal Court, including Ten Billion (2012) and 2071(2014) about the climate emergency, an issue she is passionate about.

Recent productions at the Royal Court include her ongoing collaboration with the writer Alice Birch on Ophelia’s Zimmer (Ophelia's Room) and Anatomy of a Suicide.

At the National Theatre, she has directed eighteen productions, the most innovative being an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves, where she combined theatre making with the use of live video, creating a form later called ‘live cinema’.

The live cinema work was subsequently developed in Germany and France.

She has directed more than 15 live cinema productions in the UK, Austria, Germany and France, at theatres like the Schaubühne Theatre (Berlin) and the Schauspielhaus in Cologne, and these pieces have toured the world including Greece, Russia, China, Portugal and Brazil.

Whilst at the National Theatre, Mitchell pioneered children’s theatre for primary school age theatre goers, including an adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat.

Her interest in this age group also led her to initiate English National Opera’s first ever opera commission for a primary school audience - an adaptation of Oliver Jeffers' book, The Way Back Home.

In 2015 the Stadsschouwburg theatre in Amsterdam held a retrospective of her opera and theatre work, presenting eight productions from across Europe.

In 2016 Mitchell was described as ‘British theatre’s Queen in exile’ and a director who ‘provokes strong reactions.’ Some see her ‘as a vandal, ripping apart classic texts and distorting them to her own dubious purpose’ and others ‘consider her to be the most important British director of theatre and opera at work today – indeed, among the greatest in the world.’ (The Guardian, 14 January 2016)