Katie Mitchell Research Paper

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Katie Mitchell is a British theatre director whose work has received various different opinions and reviews. According to The Guardian, Mitchell “has been hailed as the closest thing British theatre has to a genuine auteur: a director with a strong, uncompromising vision of how theatre should be” (Oltermann). Her exceptional directing style and methods have attracted both positive and negative feedback from her audiences and critics, reaching past the unknown and creating a new artistic style for the theatre. Whether watching a performance of one of her shows, or reading her directing book entitled “The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre”, new and seasoned directors have much to learn from Katie Mitchell’s distinctive directing style. …show more content…

She studied English at Magdalen College in Oxford. Her theatrical career began when she served as a production assistant at King’s Head Theatre in 1986. Only a year later, Mitchell moved on to serve as the assistant director at Paines Plough, and became the assistant director of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1988. She became the founder of her own theatre company in 1990, entitled Classics on a Shoestring. While there, she directed numerous productions of well-known plays such as Women of Troy and Bernada Alba, all of which received exceptional praise and accreditation (Liptrott). Mitchell has also served as an associate director at the Royal Court Theatre, the Royal National Theatre, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. At the Royal Shakespeare Company, she directed The Phoenician Women, which led her to receive the Evening Standard Award for Best Director in 1996. During the year of 1997, Mitchell programmed the Royal Shakespeare Company’s black box space, also known as The Other Place …show more content…

In 2012, Mitchell began working alongside scientist Stephen Emmott. The team spent five months workshopping ideas on how to produce a theatrical work on the topic. After realizing that their work was becoming too similar to others being produced on the same subject, they came to the realization that they would need to use another form of storytelling outside of the traditional theatrical setting. They then went on to the Royal Court and created Ten Billion, a dramatized lecture that inspired her to work alongside Emmott again

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