`It was all so unimaginably different/and all so long ago," wrote Louis MacNeice, reflecting on ancient Greece in his Autumn Journal. Katie Mitchell, newly appointed associate director at The Abbey, would vehemently disagree. When she talks about Iphigenia at Aulis, written by Euripides at the close of the fifth century B.C., her tense is the present imperative. Analysing the episode chosen by Euripides from the prelude to the Trojan War, she refers to the Balkans, to contemporary warfare, to spin doctors and propagandists.
The central issue of the play is whether the Greek king, Agamemnon, should kill his teenage daughter Iphigenia to ensure that the gods will allow the becalmed Greek fleet to sail to Troy. The ships are mustered at Aulis, on the Greek coast, waiting for the wind to change, and Agamemnon has been told by a priest that this sacrifice is demanded by the goddess Artemis.
If he does kill Iphigenia, how will he justify that decision to himself and to others, especially his wife Clytemnestra? If he doesn't, will another commander take over the leadership of the Greek expedition? Euripides constructs the arguments in seamless rhetoric, while the chorus of Greek women whips up anti-Trojan fervour. "It's exquisite political writing about expediency and self-deception," says Mitchell.
While Agamemnon deliberates and argues about his decision with his brother, Menelaus, events overtake him. Iphigenia arrives at Aulis believing she is to be married to the warrior Achilles, but soon willingly agrees to sacrifice her life for the sake of a Greek victory over the Trojans. Her mother Clytemnestra is not so easily reconciled and her anger towards Agamemnon will fuel the cycle of revenge killings in Agamemnon's family, the House of Atreus, which form the subject of other Greek tragedies, including the great trilogy, The Oresteia, by Aeschylus.
Over the past few weeks, Katie Mitchell and her cast have been studying press coverage of the Falklands war and watching a documentary series (Hitler's Women) about women and Nazism. They've pondered on nationalism, patriotism, displaced peoples, the fate of women in wartime. The rehearsal room is plastered with cuttings and photograph collages like the walls of a primary school classroom. There is a pedagogical zeal about Mitchell; she has described herself as an anthropologist or archaeologist in her approach to other cultures and to the past.
"I work in a very dogged way at first, with logical, psychological realism," she says. "We've all been thinking about the chorus of Greek women in this play, trying to understand what they would think and feel, what might happen to them. They want the Trojans to be annihilated and they believe the propaganda because they're frightened. It's their blind spot."
Terror of her fate prompts Iphigenia to swallow the patriotic rhetoric of her father - "What nation is greater than Greece?" he asks - while he, Menelaus, and Achilles are shown to be motivated by vanity, egotism and fear. Euripides's depiction of familiar mythical figures is far from heroic and this, for Mitchell, is part of the play's appeal.
"Most of us are cowardly," she says. "One always has the dream that there's a clear right and wrong, but it's at times of war, in this kind of moral quagmire, that we see how ugly our desires actually are.
"We have to make this real for us. It's a play about war, about men who lead countries to war, about what they will do to win a war. I think it's not moral to talk about war, to perform a play about war and not imagine it fully. There's a danger of vicariousness."
So, there will be no masks in this production, no togas and Ionic columns bathed in the white light of reason, nothing that ritualises or distances Euripides from us - beyond, of course, the inevitable dilutions of translation. Having read all of the available translations, Mitchell opted for Don Taylor's, which has poetic austerity and simplicity as well as rhythm and assonance.
The period of this production is loosely 1940s, evoking the second World War, but without being too specific. Francis O'Connor's design for the encampment at Aulis suggests a transit camp, temporarily housed in the bare vastness of a disused warehouse.
"I wanted to use anachronism carefully, so that it's not reductive," Mitchell says. "The important thing is to find a visceral, practical embodiment of a situation. I want to translate these moral and political ideas into an accessible human conflict, so that we have a sense of what it might be like to be caught up in a vengeance cycle. If it's placed and played accurately, then we feel that we all know this experience. The big ideas will always live in the details - first you have to imagine yourself as Clytemnestra and Iphigenia."
Mitchell is famously demanding of her audience. "I want to create theatre that makes us think about ideas, that punctures complacency and cynicism," she says. She wants theatre to be as close to non-dramatic life as possible, to create a stage experience "that could make you more careful with someone on the street".
Influenced by the Eastern European and Russian directors with whom she worked after leaving Oxford, she set up her own touring company, Classics On A Shoestring, in her 20s. Her trademarks, in productions of Ibsen, Chekhov, Euripides, Genet, Shakespeare, Lorca and Aeschylus for London's Royal Court and the RSC, are her extensive research, including field trips, and her engagement with ideas. While in the past she has been inclined to leave the evidence of her research strewn around the stage, it's a tendency she now seems keen to curb.
Her daring adaptation of Aeschylus's trilogy, The Oresteia, for the Royal National Theatre last year made heavy use of video images, which functioned as contextualising marginal notes. These will not feature in Iphigenia, however.
"Ooohhh no," she says, shaking her head and smiling. "I got badly burned over that."
Her six-hour Oresteia, based on Ted Hughes's bluntly energetic translation of the texts, was such an ambitious undertaking and got such a scorching critical reception that it wouldn't have been surprising if Mitchell had steered clear of Greek tragedy for some time afterwards. But clearly the House of Atreus continues to fascinate her.
"That, yes, definitely, but also the arguments of this play, Iphi- genia - its anti-war message resonates for me," she says. "Euripides wrote it during the Peloponnesian War, and was obviously commenting on that war . . ." She stops short, eyeing me intently: "Do you think I'm wrong?"
This self-questioning spirit, honesty and openness to dialogue informed her reaction to reviews of The Oresteia last year. As the cuttings piled up, she studied them intently, analysed the arguments and sought further clarification from a critic she respected, Michael Billington. She then took the highly unusual step of re-rehearsing the trilogy, incorporating changes in response to the critiques, mainly removing some of the more distracting staging devices and softening the anachronisms.
"The reviews really impacted on me. If the criticism hadn't hurt so much, I wouldn't have processed it and made it into something creative. I didn't want anything to block the audience's perception of the play," she says.
Her response suggests exciting possibilities for the creative application of criticism. Perhaps, after all, the polarisation of practitioner/artist and critic could be overcome, or revealed for what it is: defensive convention.
She shakes my hand, her mind already back on the rehearsal process.
"Come and see it as often as you can, won't you, and we can compare notes. That's what's so exquisite about theatre, isn't it? You can tamper with it, it's always mutable. And that leads to brilliance, to something gorgeous."
Iphigenia At Aulis opens tonight at the Abbey Theatre at 8 p.m. and runs until April 21st. Booking at 01-878 7222.
