DEBORAH WARNER

Deborah Warner CBE is a British director working internationally in Theatre and Opera. 

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The writer and critic Rupert Christiansen reflects on Deborah Warner’s work, drawing on his long and extensive experience of her productions: 

 

"Over more than four decades, Deborah Warner has extended the boundaries of  performance, redefining the expressive vocabulary of music and drama through an oeuvre of rare consistency and integrity marked by its raw energy, sharp wit and moral complexity. 

 

In recent years she has focused on a long-term project to stage the major operas of Benjamin Britten in productions that have won several prestigious awards and been seen in Madrid, London, Paris and Rome. On a smaller scale, she has enjoyed a highly successful term as Artistic Director of the Ustinov Studio at the Theatre Royal, Bath, programming work that embraced chamber music and dance as well as Shakespeare and Pinter. 

 

Although the majority of her work has focused on major classics of opera and classical drama, she has also experimented with the performance of poetry (The Waste Land) and the staging of oratorio (St John Passion, Messiah). Another important strand of her work defies categorization: both Peace Camp, made along the coast of Britain for the British 2012 Olympics, and The Angel Project, created in London and reimagined for New York, transcend the clichés of immersive theatre and gallery installation. She has to date made relatively few excursions into new work (The Powerbook, Between Worlds and Testament of Mary being exceptions) or comedy, and although she has made much creative use of video on stage, she has directed only once for the cinema - a lyrical adaptation of Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Last September, starring Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon.

 

Her first creations for Kick – a company that she invented and managed herself – were deeply influenced by the example of Peter Brook and his belief that the performer must always be at the centre of the event.  (‘I’m not sure I would have been in any way conscious of the potency of theatre if I hadn’t seen his work,’ she said in an interview with Vogue in July 1994). Other figures important in her formative years include Peter Stein, who commissioned her production of Coriolanus at the Salzburg Festival, and Nicholas Payne and Anthony Whitworth-Jones who commissioned her first essays in opera, at Opera North and Glyndebourne respectively. 

 

Earlier in her career she developed a close partnership with the actor Fiona Shaw, creating a wide range of theatrical projects that have been seen and praised throughout Europe and the USA. The Sunday Times critic John Peter wrote of their vision of Richard II that ‘Warner and Shaw are not being either fashionable or reactionary … They are making theatre that is an adventure, a journey of the mind, a discovery of other ages, other countries, other people, other minds.' Warner has also enjoyed long-term collaborations with the designers Jean Kalman, Hildegard Bechtler, Chloe Obolensky, Tom Pye, and Mel Mercier, the singer Ian Bostridge and the choreographer Kim Brandstrup.

 

Although she has refused to subscribe to a rigid feminism or a political ideology, Warner's work has often explored issues of gender, notably in her ground-breaking casting of Fiona Shaw as Shakespeare’s Richard II. She was also the first woman director to be given sole charge of a production in the main house of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

 

Her approach transcends national barriers and cultures – to a remarkable degree, her productions have travelled globally, their resonances subtly transformed by exposure to different environments and atmospheres. Sceptical of the conventional division between stage and auditorium, she has a keen interest in exploring ‘found’ spaces, both large and small. Although she avoids gratuitous spectacle, her work can accommodate grandeur of scale when the material requires it - her productions of Coriolanus and Julius Caesar featured imaginative use of hundreds of extras. Her process requires long, rigorous, and intensely exploratory rehearsal periods and she commits to a continual development of interpretation throughout a production’s lifespan of runs and revivals – principles that have often made her projects difficult to fund, especially in the UK. 

 

Informed by her Quaker background, her wide reading and constant travel, she is an artist of exceptional honesty and seriousness who does not cut corners to compromise with commercial imperatives. 'Deborah’s incredibly open,’ said the actor Brian Cox, who played Titus Andronicus and King Lear for her. ‘She works like a gardener: prepares the bed, plants the seed, waters it and watches it grow.’  

 

Deborah Warner is an Associate Artist at the Barbican Theatre. In 2019 she was Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre at the University of Oxford. Other awards include an honorary Doctorate at Bath Spa University, and an honorary Fellowship at the Central School of Speech and Drama. She was made a CBE in 2006 and in France is decorated as Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des lettres.

" - Rupert Christiansen, 2025