‘I’m really into cow farming,” says Katie Mitchell. It seems an unexpected interest for one of Europe’s most rigorous, eco-conscious theatre directors. But she was “brought up in the 1970s self-sufficiency movement, in the Brecon Beacons”, and now has “a little place in Wales, opposite a cow farm”.
Mitchell is talking dairy farming in a dressing room in London’s Royal Court theatre. We’re sitting with sound artist Melanie Wilson and playwright Nina Segal, her collaborators on a radical wordless project, Cow | Deer, which goes “between the ears” of its title characters. Tucking into Ottolenghi takeout during a rehearsal break, they describe how they are putting animals at the play’s centre and making sound its medium.
