She Delivers More Than a Message : Katie Mitchell is looking for the intersection of politics and passion in the classics she directs, an approach that has made her a new force on the British stage.

Director Katie Mitchell’s condensation of the Shakespearean trilogy “Henry VI” echoes Yeats’ lament: “The best lack all conviction / while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Yeats could have been writing about gentle Henry and his eventual successor, the Machiavellian Richard III, in the complex 30-year struggle that made up the War of the Roses. But he was looking out over the 20th Century.

So is she.

“I wanted to do something in response to what’s been happening in Bosnia and Rwanda,” she says of the Royal Shakespeare Company production, which opened in London in July and comes to the Cerritos Performing Arts Center Tuesday as part of the UK/LA fest.

“The world community has acted shamefully. We’re gripped in a spiritual malaise and an emptiness of culture that’s led to an unwillingness to take responsibility. You hear this awful phrase, ‘compassion fatigue,’ like it’s a disease you have to cure yourself of. I wanted to remind the British particularly that we’ve been through two incredibly bloody civil wars of our own. We’re not immune to it.”

At 29, Mitchell is one of a handful of young directors causing a stir in the British theater scene; their number includes Stephen Daldry, Sam Mendes, Matthew Warchus and Deborah Warner. Mitchell is past president of the Oxford Theater Society, and while she’s been on staff at the RSC since 1988, she still runs her own operation, Classics on a Shoestring.

*

Her “Henry VI” is an examination, and a meditation as well, on familial ruin and on the theme that once a sword is dipped in blood, it can never be wiped clean. Nor will it easily be put to rest. And it asks, in effect, how can we forget the ghastliness of civil war without being doomed to see it repeated?

Mitchell addresses these morally loaded questions with a political passion that roils through her entire conversation. For example, she has directed Garcia Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba” for Classics on a Shoestring. While it’s become a classic study of a mother’s ruthless tyranny over her daughters, cloaked in the veil of honor, Mitchell states that Lorca originally intended it to be a play about fathers and sons set in the Manichean starkness of Spanish culture and history, but political conditions made such a depiction dangerous in the extreme. (Not that it did any good; he was executed by Franco’s rebels anyway, before the play ever made it to the stage.)

She says she wanted to show the affect of war on “The Trojan Women.” “But Adrian (Noble, the RSC’s artistic director) didn’t think he could sell it.” Artists of conscience and political engagement, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, crop up in conversation, as do references to Eastern Europe, where politics and theater breathe the same air.

“I don’t believe in art for art’s sake,” she says. “That leads to vanity. The fundamental question one should ask oneself is, ‘What is my place of responsibility in the world community?’ ”

A small alarm goes off in the listener’s back brain: Political theater, at least in America, is most of the time deadly theater. Agitprop. Wooden declamation. Preaching to the converted. No one cares to wait for Lefty anymore. Godot doesn’t even get that many takers these days.

Her demeanor, moreover, reflects a didact’s urgency. Her words tumble out in rushes and rapid swoops. Though her eyes are unwaveringly fixed on her listener, she often turns her face slightly away as she speaks. Is this intended to hide an even more voluble combativeness? Or does the gesture shield a fine artist’s innate vulnerability?

Mitchell began her directing career at age 19. When she joined the RSC as assistant director, Adrian Noble saw a young woman “full of vim and ideas, and passionate about how theater and society interface. She’s a curious mix of anthropologist and artist. When she did ‘The Dybbuk’ for us, she conducted such an extraordinary eight- to 10-week rehearsal that by the end she transformed the company into Ukrainian Jews. And she’s not Jewish. She’s not bound by social realism. She’s got theatrical poetry.”

“Before I directed ‘The Dybbuk’ in 1991, I followed (playwright Solomon) Anski’s footprints into the Ukraine,” Mitchell says, sitting at the head of a large table in the Cerritos Performing Arts Center conference room. “The play says nothing of the Holocaust, but it foretold the Holocaust. Yet it remained this most beautiful love story, didn’t it? Beautiful and sensual and deeply private.”

She walked two fingers up her bare arm in a gesture depicting someone walking impishly along a strand--the dybbuk so freely at home in its host that it can pleasurably take the air. Mitchell smiled the open smile of a woman in love. It was an extraordinarily precise and tender expression, free of any ideologue’s stoniness.

*

Mitchell’s political awareness seems a more natural than acquired response to her surroundings, particularly as she describes an early childhood of noting her parents’ friction points.

“My father is a working-class Cockney from the Midlands, and my mother’s family owned what later became British Steel. They’re both beautiful, but there were, ah, spirited differences in their political beliefs. He was a dentist but hated it; at 30 he discovered the arts and retired to found a private press called Libanus, which is one of the most important of its kind in the country. He was very keen that we should be arts-based.” (Mitchell has a younger brother who’s a photographer.)

The family divided its time between Berkshire in the home country, and a cottage in Wales. “He was on a self-sufficiency kick, so in Wales we lived off the land,” Mitchell recalls. “We ate rabbits. I’m not an urban creature. I’ve been living in London seven years now and was at Oxford before that. But I think I’d be much happier in a rural society, which has made me very sensitive to light and sound. Nature is dominant in my work.”

Mitchell started private school at 3 to satisfy her mother’s political beliefs, and later moved to public school to satisfy those of her father. Then she went to an all-girls school in the south of England, and finished up the equivalent of an American high school level education at a coeducational institution, where her discovery of the theater corresponded to her growing realization that she’d never make it as a painter.

Oxford University followed, where she wrote radio plays and founded a feminist theater. A post-graduate grant afforded her a lengthy trip to Poland, Russia and Berlin, which brought all the hoped-for results--a spiritual reconnection with her Eastern European forebears, and a chance to observe some of the Continent’s leading theater practitioners up close, Andrzej Wajda and Heiner Muller of the Berliner Ensemble among them (she also visited the Moscow Art Theater).

The trip also enabled her to clarify her ideas on a working technique. “It’s strictly egalitarian,” she says. “In the first two weeks of rehearsal, no one does his part. We analyze. We take field trips. After that, we work on Stanislavsky-based objectives, which consist of understanding story conflict, of anti-emoting. He created a deeply pragmatic, sensible method and theory of acting. You just can’t walk out into a space and convey meaning. You have to know the people you’re working with; you have to know what your character thinks as well as what he does and says.”

No one familiar with Mitchell or her work sees it forged in iron zealotry.

“I first met Katie in a corner cafe in St. Martins,” says actress Jane Lapotaire, whom Mitchell cast as the lead in Ibsen’s “Ghosts” (Lapotaire won a best actress Tony in New York for her 1981 portrayal of “Piaf”). “My first impression of her was that she’s a beautiful woman. Steely gray eyes, no makeup, the physique of a ballet dancer. Later I saw that her wardrobe consists entirely of gray. She had beautiful long brown hair that she kept in a tight bun. I realized that she’s a theater nun, ruthlessly dedicated to text.

“We got on because I’m about the age of her mother,” Lapotaire continued. “Working with Katie, I’ve never been so closely walled in my head as an actor. She’s ruthlessly loyal to the playwright, right down to punctuation. She’ll do all the groundwork actors normally try to do themselves. She has a fine antenna for whether you’re living in the line. She’ll say, ‘I think that was blurred a bit,’ and you’ll know right away that you’ve been relying on the actor’s device instead of living the line.

“She also has a keenly developed aesthetic sense when it comes to lighting and sound. There were perhaps only five or six sound cues during the entire length of ‘Ghosts.’ A seagull’s cry. A church bell. Their economy made them so potent, so potent.”

Of politics in Mitchell’s theater, Lapotaire says, “Katie may have been thinking of Bosnia when she staged ‘Henry VI,’ but she still set it in post-medieval England. Her first priority is to let the truth of the play speak for itself. I’d say her trademarks are economy, ruthless clarity, and an extremely democratic generosity when it comes to actors. She’s a woman of the theater first. I wouldn’t have worked with her otherwise.”

Benedict Nightingale, drama critic for the London Times, was unfamiliar with a play he was about to review in 1990, Thomas Heywood’s “A Woman Killed With Kindness,” the story of an adulteress who starves herself to death, written in 1603.

“I didn’t know Katie Mitchell’s work then,” Nightingale recalls. “I read the play and thought, ‘This is rubbish. It’s completely lacking in sophistication and style.’ But Katie turned what I thought were the play’s weaknesses completely to her advantage. You saw in the character a most touching helplessness.”

Nightingale has been keeping track of Mitchell ever since, and has seen productions as disparate as “Ghosts,” “Rutherford & Son,” and John Arden’s “Live Like Pigs.”

“She has a distinctive style, but it’s not a case of imposing her view--she respects the author. She goes for an understated realism that could easily be flat and banal, but she charges it with intense emotion. It seems a paradox, but the result is a kind of unpretentious intensity. Simplicity is a characteristic of her work. She gets her actors charged.”

Nightingale wouldn’t be a critic if he didn’t harbor a reservation or two--as playwright John Richardson once said, “He also serves who stands aside and prates.” Of Mitchell, Nightingale says, “I don’t know if she really wants the larger space; she tends to go in for chamber productions. And she only does revivals--although that’s characteristic of the new young directors in general. I think Thatcher’s England and its aftermath has been particularly discouraging to the new playwright.

“I think she’s done better work than she shows in ‘Henry VI,’ ” he added. “But she does a lot with a difficult subject. It’s one of Shakespeare’s earlier plays, and notoriously difficult to bring to life. It doesn’t show a lot of respect for its characters, who’re like kids in a sand pit--except they have the power to chop off each other’s heads.”

Indeed, while the periphery of “Henry VI” is draped in the shadows of conspirators honing their schemes, its center contains the wan light of aftermath--the faded image of a rainy October morning 40 years earlier, when the redoubtable Henry V whipped up his exhausted, terrified, disease-ridden troops to one more stand in the field at Agincourt. It was one of the most amazing battles ever fought. French knights, eager to crush the ragtag British, slathered onto a field so thick with mud that they crammed into immobilized clots of tangled iron, leather and flesh, where the British waded in and hacked them to death.

Henry’s army of less than 6,000, losing but 450 of their own, left 30,000 French dead. He would go on to sign a peace treaty with the King of France and to woo and wed the king’s daughter, Katharine, and then stand as one of history’s incandescent symbols of courage and patriotic heroism. But neither he nor anyone else knew that Agincourt’s blood would eventually seep into his House of Lancaster, and claim his son.

“A slaughterer,” Mitchell calls Henry V. Other adjectives include, “greedy,” “vicious,” and “a warmonger.” Suddenly our hindsight shifts uneasily on our shared cinematic recollection of Laurence Olivier’s swollen militant pride, Kenneth Branagh’s boyishly charmed purposefulness. All of which underscores Nightingale’s observation, “There’s a gritty integrity in Katie’s work that shows up in ‘Henry VI,’ ” as he concludes, “I judge her by an extremely high standard.”

Indeed, by the time her interview ends, Mitchell has disabused her listener of the notion that the theater, to her, is some kind of bully pulpit. “Life is more interesting than theater,” she says. “One doesn’t know where one’s greed for life may lead. It could be anthropology. It could be working for Amnesty International. But theater is an art form you should not take lightly. If I don’t keep a 100% commitment to it, I’ll walk away.”*