“We really can’t be doing 1603 now. We really can’t”: Katie Mitchell, Theatrical Adaptation, and Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness

The 2011 National Theatre production of A Woman Killed with Kindness marked Katie Mitchell’s second directorial encounter with Heywood’s tragedy. Mitchell’s strategy when she first came to the play in 1991 at the Royal Shakespeare Company was to intervene relatively little in the telling of the story, allowing “historical context” to provide the relevant interpretive framework for Frankford’s punishment of his adulterous wife. Twenty years later, Mitchell abandoned 1603 in order to set the action in 1919, in part because she now heard in Woman Killed an authorial critique of—or at least a critical ambivalence towards—the avenging husband. This inability to know what Heywood (in Mitchell’s words) “really [thought] about the death of Anne”—an uncertainty of interpretation that is replicated in the play’s more recent criticism—became determining of Mitchell’s understanding of the play. This essay analyzes Mitchell’s sometimes highly interventionist performance choices, and argues that the 2011 staging—whether or not one wants to call it adaptation—sought to serve both text and author by allowing spectators to hear an underlying ambivalence towards the death (suicide, murder) of Anne Frankford. Mitchell’s turn away from an early historical setting is thus one feature of a staging that offers to re-present and re-evaluate explicitly as a site of interpretive feminist debate a drama commonly regarded as the early modern period’s finest example of domestic tragedy.