LAUSR

Katie Mitchell is, by any measure, a prolific director. In the decade 2009–18, she opened 59 productions, of which 21 were operas; 31 were originated outside her native United Kingdom. This achievement is yet more significant because, in many respects, Mitchell’s rise to prominence as one of the United Kingdom’s and Europe’s most highly regarded auteur directors has been achieved against the odds. There was, for most of the twentieth century, little opportunity within the mainstream theatre for female directors to achieve what Mitchell has done since, in 1989, she went more or less directly from obscurity, via a period as an assistant director with Paines Plough, to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), where she made her full professional directorial debut with Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (The Other Place, 1991). When, in 1993, Richard Eyre, then the Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Great Britain (NT), met the ‘gifted, bright, young and idealistic’ Mitchell, she reportedly wanted ‘to run a company like ArianeMnouchkine’, whose Théâtre du Soleil had taken up residence in the grounds of a former munitions factory near Paris known as theCartoucherie in 1964, the year that Mitchell was born. Eyre responded with the possibly helpful but certainly somewhat dismissive observation that ‘Ariane took years to establish herself and still works herself to the bone: she directs the plays, runs the theatre, oversees the catering and tears the tickets’. He records that Mitchell’s response was to appear ‘slightly dashed’ and generalises that her ‘generation seem lesswilling to go out into thewilderness and start their own companies’, without reflecting that severe reductions in the economic value of, and access to, state unemployment benefit during the 1980s, for example, were likely to be a more significant cause than generational malaise. Eyre went on, however, to notemore perceptively that ‘we voraciously draw them [directors like Mitchell] into the big companies’. In spite of its analytical shortcomings, Eyre’s observation would be borne out by Mitchell’s subsequent career, in which she has kept one foot firmly planted in the mainstream, and the other frequently lodged outside it. She first directed at the NT in 1994, creating 1. This work was supported by the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments [David Bradby Award for Early Career Research in European Theatre, 2017].