Exploring Space at Play: the Making of the Theatrical Event

Abstract

Deborah Warner is one of the most exciting of the generation of directors who emerged during the 'eighties – incidentally claiming for women a natural entrance into a profession previously dominated by men. In 1980 she formed the Kick Theatre Company, with whom over the following, formative years of her career she directed The Good Person of Szechwan, The Tempest, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Coriolanus, and Woyzeck. In 1988, following a production for the RSC of Titus Andronicus in the previous year, she became one of the company's resident directors, staging King John and Electra before moving in 1990 as an associate director to the National, where her first two productions were of The Good Person with Fiona Shaw and King Lear with Brian Cox. During the 'nineties, she has extended both the nature and the range of her work, directing Shaw in Hedda Gabler in Dublin, Coriolanus in German at the Salzburg Festival, Don Giovanni at Glyndbourne – and, in 1994–95, the season she discusses below, a revival of Beckett's Footfalls at the Garrick, controversially banned by the Beckett Estate, a dramatization of Eliot's seminal inter-war poem The Waste Land, premiered in Brussels, Richard II at the Cottesloe, with a woman, Fiona Shaw, in the title-role, and a project for the London International Festival of Theatre site-specific to the old railway hotel at St. Pancras. In September 1995 she discussed her recent and future work with Geraldine Cousin, who teaches Theatre Studies in the University of Warwick, where she has just completed a study of contemporary plays by women entitled Women in Dramatic Place and Time.