Listening to a Pinter double bill: Mitchell’s direction of Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes at the Royal Court Theatre

ABSTRACT The double bill of Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes at the Royal Court Theatre in June-July 2001 has proven to be a kind of its own in the history of productions of Pinter’s plays for the stage. What I attempt to do in this essay is to recapture the double bill by analysing a monophonic and unedited sound-only recording of the performance of Mountain Language on 2 July 2001 and that of the performance of Ashes to Ashes on the same date, both archived in the British Library. I will show 1) how sounds in the performances of the two plays related to one another; and 2) how significant Katie Mitchell’s direction of both plays and Gareth Fry’s sound design for the double bill were at the crossroads of Pinter, performance, and sound.