Review – Cate Blanchett in When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, Dorfman Theatre

• 

Oh my word. You’d think by now we would know better.

Review – A Woman Killed with Kindness, National Theatre

Questioner: You’re directing A Woman Killed with Kindness again but this time at the National Theatre tell us something about it.

Katie Mitchell: Well it’s an early seventeenth-century domestic tragedy by Thomas Heywood. It’s about John Frankford and his wife Anne. He invites Wendoll into his home to act as a companion. He tells him that anything in his house is at Wendoll’s disposal which he take literally.

Early Modern Elizabethan and Jacobean views of fasting or self-starvation were often hearkened to old Medieval views which considered a woman’s fasting a visual cue to a woman’s obedience, chastity, and honour. Eating, binging, or gluttony were considered to be fundamentally connected with sexuality. Gluttony will inevitabily lead to lust, as we see here. Several tract writers suggest female fasting should be a part of a woman’s education as it would make her to be a better wife and mother.* 

Review – …some trace of her, National Theatre

Andrew will go to any lengths to avoid visiting the Cottesloe Theatre.

Claiming rather grandly that he would be “flying back from a business trip to Hamburg” Phil was forced to fly solo with his first ever visit to a Katie Mitchell production: …some trace of her.

So elaborate was Andrew’s ruse that he even phoned Phil from the “departure lounge” just to add to the veracity of his story. “Airport noises” could be heard in the background, the bing-bong of a tannoy, a screaming child, and Andrew’s own weary “I’m at an airport” irritation all helped his painstaking fiction. Was Andrew actually still at home twiddling around with the knob on his wireless?

So …some trace of her then, but no trace of Andrew…