ABSTRACT
Unmistakably, the line was T.S. Eliot’s. The voice, the body were Fiona Shaw’s. And, just as unmistakably, the theatre-making intelligence directing the production was Deborah Warner’s. No one could misread the signature. Deborah Warner is, for actors like Brian Cox, Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw, quite simply the most meticulous, continuously challenging and surprising Shakespeare director of her generation, a reputation all the more impressive because it rests on only five professional Shakespeare productions in the UK in a career launched in 1987 with Titus Andronicus for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) followed by King John (RSC, 1988), King Lear (National Theatre [NT], 1992), Richard II (NT, 1995), and Julius Caesar (Barbican, 2005). That this ‘great Shakespearian’ should have been directing not Shakespeare but Eliot in Wilton’s mouldering East End saloon in 1997, only ten years after her stunning debut in Stratford-upon-Avon, was entirely in character. Warner’s clarity of vision and obstinate determination to serve her vision has meant that she has regularly fled from the kind of ‘institutional’ Shakespeare too often produced by the RSC in ‘deadly theatre’
mode (certainly throughout the 1990s) into opera, film, installation art; into Euripides, Beckett and Brecht. Wherever she goes, her work as a theatre ‘maker’ – the term she prefers instead of ‘director’ – has utter integrity. The opening of The Waste Land, then, gives insight into her ‘making’ of Shakespeare; it reads like a brief anthology of her practical and creative ‘genius’. (That’s Russell Beale’s word: she’s ‘utterly unique; a genius’ [Interview, May 2007]. But ‘a genius’ is what Shaw and Cox call her, too.)
So what does this opening show? For one thing, her brilliance at negotiating space, whether it’s the wasteland stretch of Wilton’s music-hall stage; the vast exposed tract of the Barbican; the hemmed-in claustrophobia of The Other Place or The Pit; the improvised ‘get-up’ installations of productions on tour. Her visual aesthetic is minimalist, austere: Shaw, naked-armed in a black sheath dress and boots, alone among the ‘heap of broken images’ of Eliot’s poetry, offers a typical stage image. It’s a style, Warner says, based on her own ‘shyness and reticence’; on her belief that ‘the theatre experience is about something laid bare’ (The Times Magazine, 27 January-2 February 2001). Emptiness appeals to her. She wants, says Hildegard Bechtler, a designer who has worked with Warner regularly, ‘a playing space which is free enough for her and the actors to invent in’ (Daily Telegraph, 2 June 1995). Design isn’t prearranged. It evolves in the rehearsal room but into sets that don’t work like sets, into ‘anti-“set” sets’ that strip down, that strip away. (For contrast, says Bechtler, compare the full, elaborately stuffed worlds designed for Shakespeare by, for example, Bob Crowley and Mark Thompson.)
The effect of such visual austerity is to fix the theatrical focus on the actor – Shaw, for example, marooned on Wilton’s stage – and to make the actor what a play called King Lear or Richard II is about, what poetry like Eliot’s is ‘doing’. ‘I don’t direct plays’, Warner says. ‘I direct actors’. There’s a difference. ‘I don’t just find the play, decide what it’s about and then push actors [into embodying] what it’s about’: ‘I direct actors’ ideas’ (Observer, 30 April 1989). As a result, Warner’s rehearsals proceed at a snail’s pace. Her patience with actors is legendary. She ‘celebrates the performer’, says Fiona Shaw of this director whom she’s described as egoless, ‘a cipher’; someone who, instead of pushing her own concepts, throws the play open to actors, to work by trial and error, to get lost and, slowly, by stripping away received ideas, to get to the heart of things. She ‘fine tunes the actor’, wanting ‘you to be more yourself than you’ve ever been before: more grandly poetic, more vulgar, more beautiful, more physically dangerous’ (Interview, May 2007). Her method? ‘She pours love into you’, says Simon Russell Beale:
ruthlessly pours love into you, gives you limitless praise, determined to make you feel confident. YOU WILL FEEL absolutely every time
you walk on stage that you are THE BEST. Which makes an actor willing to take risks. Her particular genius is in releasing an actor into his personal territory of crisis – unsettling his fixed positions, the performance he knows how to give. She’s obstinate, dogged at getting an actor to do something he doesn’t want to do.
