Deborah Warner

Warner was born in Oxfordshire, England, to antiquarians Roger Harold Metford Warner and Ruth Ernestine Hurcombe.[1] After attending Sidcot School and St Clare's, Oxford, she studied Stage Management at Central School of Speech and Drama.[2] In 1980 she founded the KICK theatre company when she was 21.[3]

Warner's ENO production of Handel's Messiah (London Coliseum, 2009)

Warner has since the 1980s worked in close creative partnership with the actor Fiona Shaw, developing a wide range of projects that have been seen throughout Europe and the United States. 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."[4] Warner has also enjoyed long-term collaborations with the designers Jean Kalman, Hildegard Bechtler, Chloé Obolensky, Tom Pye, Mel Mercier and the choreographer Kim Brandstrup.

Although the majority of her work has focused on major classics of spoken drama and opera, she has also experimented with the performance of poetry (The Waste Land, Readings) and the staging of oratorios (St John Passion, Messiah), as well as installations (The St Pancras and Angel projects, Peace Camp). She has made relatively few excursions into new work (Jeanette Winterson's The Powerbook (2002), Tansy Davies' 2015 opera Between Worlds and The Testament of Mary being exceptions) or comedy (The School for Scandal), and although she has made much creative use of video on stage, she has directed little for film and television.

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.

Although she has refused to subscribe to a programmatic feminism or a political ideology, her 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.

Awards

• 1988 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director – Titus Andronicus
• 1992 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director of a Play – Hedda Gabler
• 1992 Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
• 2006 Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), "for services to drama".[8]

Nominations

• 1997 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Play – The Waste Land
• 2003 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Play – Medea
• 2003 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play – Medea
• 2008 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Play – Happy Days

• Deborah Warner at the Internet Broadway Database
• Deborah Warner at IMDb