It was of huge interest to listen to Deborah Warner talk about her career due to her enormous experience of directing both theatre and opera. Although Warner said that she realised more people in the audience would want to hear about her work in theatre rather than opera, there were numerous questions from the audience on both mediums, especially when it became obvious that her work in both fields are, for her, intrinsically linked through the language and rhythms of a piece. It would also be amiss not to mention that her work in opera and understanding of how to work with sets, casts and budgets on a hugely different scale to theatre, alongside the ability to read music, has strengthened her position to work on a fairly constant basis.
Although Warner was reluctant to talk too much about her past if it wasn’t relevant to the questions we had to ask her, “Things get sort of shipwrecked on something so long ago, I don’t know if it is the richest vein of discussion.” She did, however, give a quick précis of her work, throughout 2009, in which she had opened seven shows! Five of which had been opera (Britten’s Death in Venice in Brussels and Luxembourg, Handel’s Messiah at The ENO and two revivals of Dido and Aeneas in Vienna and Holland) alongside Mother Courage with Fiona Shaw at The National Theatre and The Wasteland read by Fiona Shaw at Wilton’s Music Hall.
As well as this she gave a very quick summary to her first years within theatre, choosing to go to Central School of Speech and Drama where she studied Stage Management. This she found incredibly insightful to the world of directing as it allowed her to watch the rehearsal process on a continuous basis and gave her a purpose for being there. On leaving Central she formed her own theatre company KICK and with them she took a Shakespearian show to the Edinburgh Festival every year. This was interesting to hear and it probably helped her to gain work later in terms of developing her metiers so early on in her career thus allowing people to recognise her style and to see it as a strength. This certainly proved to be so as she went on to direct Measure for Measure in Stockholm and The Tempest in Bangladesh for the British Council before being asked to take on Titus Andronicus at the RSC. Warner notes that she was, ‘the only director left that they hadn’t asked,’ but due to her knowledge of the Shakespearian text they felt that they would be in safe hands.
Many people in the audience wanted to know about Warner’s rehearsal experience and how she works with actors and the differences between working with actors and opera singers. Warner mentioned that in some respects she found opera far easier than theatre as the template for the rhythm in opera had already been laid down by the composer. This is in comparison to the theatre where it was the work of the director with the actors to, ‘find the rhythm at which it is going to play.’ Rhythm, for Warner, is the foundation for which all theatre springs from. This seems to be influenced from her extensive work with Shakespearian texts and with opera, at which she drew parallels between the verse and the composer’s template for the music, ‘ignore the iambic pentameter at your peril and ignore Mozart’s musical intonation at your peril.’ For Warner it is finding the correct rhythm’s within the prose play that can cause the most difficulty, ‘you have to find what the composer would have found and put in place [and that] will be your template.’
Warner also talked about two theatre practitioners, Beckett and Brook, who inspired her as a young person wanting to go into theatre and in creating her own work. With Beckett she spoke about ‘Footfalls,’ which she directed at the Garrick Theatre and ‘Happy Days’ at the National. ‘Footfalls’ created such a furore that one critic said it was a bit like, ‘seeing someone doodling on a Rembrandt,’ and the Beckett estate banned her from taking it on tour. Warner conceded that she had misunderstood at that time that an estate can grieve and that perhaps at only 7 years after Beckett’s death to do something so dramatically different, ‘it aesthetically certainly looked new, it didn’t look like Beckett’s look,’ had been insensitive towards the Beckett estate. They did later, however, let her direct ‘Happy Days’ at the National saying that they greatly admired her work.
The main issues with ‘Footfalls’ had been due to Warner not following the stage directions and the re-assigning of lines. Stage directions have notoriously been a contentious matter with the Beckett estate, The Independent noted that Beckett had once tried to put a stop to the 35 second production of ‘Breath’ due to a ‘stage direction being violated.’ Talking about the problems with stage directions in Beckett, Warner suggested that they were often misunderstood. If you follow them it doesn’t mean that you have done the play, ‘stage directions are not like cookery recipes.’ However, following them and paying attention to them and asking why they are there can help you release the magic of the text, ‘they are not restrictive but prompts,’ to opening the play.
Towards the end Warner talked about Brook being an inspiration to her and realising what ‘he is about.’ This she told through a touching story of watching ‘Ubu’ in London and then three years later going to watch the ‘Cherry Orchard’ in Paris at the Bouffes du Nord. Warner acknowledges that she was filled with trepidation at going to Paris due to her worry that she would not be affected in the same way as she had with ‘Ubu’, because of the language barrier. Twenty minutes in to the ‘Cherry Orchard’ Warner started to cry as she realised that ‘Ubu’ had also been performed in French and she had forgotten. It was in this moment that she understood Brook and the potential of ‘theatre to go beyond language.’ This is something that Warner feels a modern audience is missing out on these days with the constant use of surtitles underpinning the action leaving us unaware to the ‘experience of language’ in the modern theatre.
- Caitlin Albery Beavan (Marketing and Admin intern)
