The Impossible Theatre: Roy Mitchell and <i>The Chester Mysteries:</i> Experience, Initiation and Brotherhood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the influence of Theosophy in the theatre work and theory of director Roy Mitchell (1884-1944). Mitchell’s apparently prescient theories concerning mise en scène, motion in acting and the communal role of the audience in the experience of theatre in his popular book Creative Theatre (1929) has led scholars such as Mavor Moore and Renate Usmiani to compare Mitchell’s work with that of Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Brook, and Jerzy Grotowski. What has been neglected, however, is Mitchell’s conviction that theatre is a "medium of revelation" that allows for the universal and, most importantly, the "creative," vital spirit or soul to manifest itself in the material world and to foster the "great end" he called the paradosis; this he defined as a "recreating instant" in which the senses are filled with "form and sound," the emotions stirred "to sympathy," and ideas shaped "to one intense accord." This event makes for the witness "a causeway into an inner world where they rested in a lightning flash of communion." In this way Mitchell envisioned the re-creation of an idealized,"ancient" form of performance, by way of the confluence of theosophical and theatrical practice, in an effort to "proclaim the immortality of the souls of all created things, to restate the law of the cyclic return of souls and of the effects of the deeds of souls, to enunciate the doctrine that all religions, philosophy and science at their highest emanated from a body of custodians of the wisdom of the race."
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".