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WAVES. Devised by Katie Mitchell and the company from the text of Virginia Woolf's novel, The Waves. Cottesloe Theatre, London. 13 January 2007.
ATTEMPTS ON HER LIFE. By Martin Crimp. Directed by Katie Mitchell and the company. Lyttelton Theatre, London. 5 April 2007.
Katie Mitchell has built a reputation for bold, often controversial stagings of both classic and contemporary texts, many at London's National Theatre. In two productions there during the 2006-07 season, Mitchell worked with the same team of designers and other collaborators as well as many of the same actors. Together, the two shows constitute an ambitious and ingenious experiment in the incorporation of multimedia and especially video technology into live theatre-an experiment all the more revealing because of significant differences between the two productions. Mitchell's interpretation of a recent script that itself thematizes the role of media and technology, staged in a large space, proved less effective than her inventive adaptation of a pre-World War II novel presented in an intimate setting.
Mitchell's Waves is based on a work that was itself very experimental. In writing The Waves between 1929 and 1931, Virginia Woolf dispensed with many of the features of conventional novels. Much of the text consists of what Woolf called "dramatic soliloquies": quotations varying in length from a single sentence to dozens of pages, which immerse the reader in the consciousness of one of six characters- three female, three male. Monologues from different periods in their lives are preceded and separated by brief passages in a narrator's voice, describing waves...