The prolific director Katie Mitchell returns to the National with …some trace of her all familiar territory for her and her trade mark twist on a classic text. It is in these south bank surroundings that Mitchell has achieved acclaim, as well as a good deal of criticism from literary purists, with Euripides’ Women of Troy, Woolf’s The Waves and Chekov’s The Seagull. …some trace of her is based on, or ‘inspired by’ as the programme semantically insists, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot in which the Russian Prince Myshkin falls in love with the beautiful Natasya.
The term ‘inspired by’ always seems to inspire a feeling of strangely ambivalent Hollywood-speak, as if the adaptation is exempt, de facto, from responsibility towards the original story at the same time as being protected, de jure, from criticism with a legal clause. The story of ‘The Idiot’ becomes secondary to the multi-layered, multimedia experience constructed by Mitchell in this innovative piece of theatre, so while her lawyers will be happy, her critics may not.
In the case of …some trace of her, the list of ‘inspirations’ should be extended well beyond Doestoevsky, though if all of Mitchell’s evidently wide range of inspirations from visual culture were listed, there would be no space left in the programme for the well deserving cast and stage credits. The actors double up as a film crew, and vice versa, as the action is filmed and projected on to a big screen behind the stage.
This allows the audience to simultaneously see all the action in ‘real life’ at the same time as the black-and-white onscreen images mediated through the camera’s eye. It is all there for the audience to see, in front of us, and yet you can’t help feeling as if your vision is being manipulated, particularly as you can only look at one of the numerous things happening on stage at any given time. The effect is therefore unstable and unsettling.
Sometimes it’s like watching a film, sometimes it’s like watching the filming of a film, and sometimes it’s like watching a play about the filming of a film. The audience laughs knowingly when we see that the Myshkin on screen is walking through a sinister Siberian forest in the rain, while the Myskin on stage remains stationary helped by water sprayers and manual sound effects from another actor. Mitchell is clearly playing with this stark contrast, constructing a bleak story of an epileptic Prince and deconstructing it with the humorous exposure of filmic technique.
The story is not completely subsumed by the display of visual trickery, but rather given several new levels all, admittedly, at once. This is just as well because the story of a young man pining after a young women, convincing himself that it is a deeper beauty he craves rather than incidental good looks, is one that has been told a thousand times in literature. Myshkin is an ‘idiot’ because of his visual shallowness, not despite of it. Ironically, it is the strikingly handsome and intense appearance of actor Ben Whishaw which helps him to portray the melancholy of the solipsistic young Prince he is playing.
Hattie Morahan, who plays his long-suffering love interest, and Jamie Ballard who plays his worldly looking love rival Rogozhin, also both possess a combination of the right look and flexible acting ability to create the multiple levels of this production. It is the sort of production long over due at the National – one which is experimental, but not for the sake of it, and one which utilises the strengths of its cast, but not for the sake of it.
In it’s compact 1 hour 30 minutes …some trace of her fortunately has more than some trace of Mitchell at her directorial best and only a small trace of dull, drawn-out Doestoevsky.
