Abstract

Feminist theater theory of decades past would have it that both early modern drama and realism are forms that are unsuited to politically effective representations of women’s lives. Director Katie Mitchell confounded such expectations with her ingenious 2011 production of A Woman Killed with Kindness; her application of techniques drawn from theatrical realism to this domestic tragedy was a feminist revelation. Rather than offering a conventional reading of the play, with its “main plot” concerning the Frankford marriage and its “subplot” concerning the Mountford siblings, Mitchell visually, aurally, and thematically twinned the two to create a new and nuanced whole. Instead of relying on Heywood’s words alone to tell the tale of the play, Mitchell layered them with elaborate physical, realistic “language,” thereby revealing dimensions of play’s female characters and their circumstances that the text alone would leave unseen or unspoken. Fully deploying the resources of the National Theatre, the production featured matched box sets that were the Mountford and Frankford homes; there, Mitchell foregrounded Anne and Susan, placing each “center stage” in her own house. Their parallel lives were presented in ongoing, simultaneous action; the realistic rooms and objects became resources for the actors’ embodied expression of their inner lives, of what lay under their lines—and between the scenes. This essay examines stage moments and strategies that demonstrate how realistic practices—and specifically the Stanislavskian, “extra-textual” interventions Mitchell made in a language-based, non-realistic play—rendered A Woman Killed with Kindness a powerful feminist theatrical event.

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