ABSTRACT
In April 2009, The Guardian’s website published a short article by its lead drama critic, Michael Billington, entitled ‘Don’t Let Auteurs Take Over in Theatre’. Billington cannot be accused of inconsistency. The word ‘auteur’, with its sinuously Gallic vowels and suspiciously un-British parsimony with concretely empirical consonants, brings together several features of the charge. Katie Mitchell was born in 1964 and studied English at Oxford University, becoming President of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, and after attachments at the King’s Head and Paines Plough, she began two years as assistant director at the Royal Shakespeare Company. More broadly, the Russian example gave Mitchell a conviction that a director’s training lasts a lifetime. The Phoenician Women is a play of watching and waiting, a cast of characters trapped in the crossfire of a civil conflict, and the energy of the production lay in the chorus.
