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Mixing new technology with live performance can have its drawbacks. In July 2008, the first preview of director Katie Mitchell's newly devised piece, ...some trace of her, at the National Theatre in London was cancelled due to "technical difficulties": the cast was not ready to perform the hi-tech show. When the performance was finally up-and-running, the result was characterized by the stylish use of on-stage video, a technique that Mitchell had first developed in her staging of Waves (National, 2006) and her revival of Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life (National, 2007). But Mitchell is not just a technical innovator: she is also taking an aesthetic stand. For many years in English theatre culture, there has been a tension between the literalists and the metaphysicals. The literalists are familiar to all audiences; they represent the great tradition of British naturalism and social realism. This aesthetic mainstream, which has thrived in both subsidized and commercial theatres since World War Two, shows the nation to itself. It voices debates and deals in issues. Its stories are linear and based firmly on a recognizable social context. Its dialogues are down-to-earth. It is distrustful of metaphor and suspicious of fancy foreign work, which is usually characterized as effete, abstract, and humorless. By contrast, English realism is muscular, earthy, and wry. The metaphysicals, however, are much less familiar: they represent a much more theatrical alternative to this text-based literary mainstream. Although the metaphysical tradition arguably goes back to Shakespeare, with his onstage ghosts and philosophical speculations, its recent embodiment has been in the so-called "physical theatre" companies such as Complicite and Kneehigh. Increasingly, even in the narrow sphere of text-based drama, there are plays that use elements of absurdism, or surrealism, or just plain non-naturalism. The labels matter a lot less than the work itself. So although Mitchell began her career as an exponent of almost anthropological naturalism by staging the work of playwrights such as Ibsen and Chekhov - usually with detailed Stanislavskian acting - she has recently moved to embrace a much more metaphysical form of theatre.
But theatre does not occur in a vacuum, and it is a tribute to the leadership of Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National, that he has made room for Mitchell's...