DeborahWarner

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  • Director

About Deborah

Deborah Warner CBE is a world-renowned and award winning British director of theatre and opera.

Particularly noted for her productions of Britten's operas, the 2025/26 season sees her direct a new production of The Turn of the Screw for the Opera di Roma and a new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Teatro Real Madrid. She will also revive her much praised production of Peter Grimes for the Royal Ballet & Opera. For the Tiroler Festspiele, Erl, Deborah directs a new double bill of La mort de Cléopâtre
& Suor Angelica and for Théâtre de l'Athénée in Paris she revives her staging of Schubert's Winterreise with Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake.

Recent engagements include an Olivier Award winning production of Billy Budd for the Teatro Real Madrid, the Royal Ballet & Opera and the Opera di Roma; Messiah for the Opéra de Lyon; Wozzeck for the Royal Ballet & Opera and Peter Grimes for the Teatro Real Madrid, co-produced with the Royal Ballet & Opera, the Opéra national de Paris and the Opera di Roma.

In the 2020/21 season Deborah directed a new production of Britten’s Phaedra for the Royal Opera House as part of their 4×4 series for streaming during the Covid-19 lockdown. The work was subsequently reworked into the double-bill Phaedra/Minotaur, seen first at the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal, Bath and, in summer 2023, at the Edinburgh International Festival, and during the 24/25 season at the Linbury Theatre in London.

She has also directed Fidelio for La Scala, Milan; La Voix humaine for Opera North and both Don Giovanni and Fidelio for the Glyndebourne Festival. For English National Opera she has directed Death in Venice (also for La Monnaie and La Scala, Milan), Bach’s St. John Passion, Janáček’s The Diary of one who Disappeared, Messiah, Eugene Onegin and the world premiere of Tansey Davies’ Between Worlds. Her production of Dido and Aeneas has been seen at the Vienna Festival, the Opéra Comique in Paris and at the Dutch National Opera and she has directed La traviata at both the Vienna Festival and for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.

Contact

Keiron Cooke

Keiron Cooke

Associate Director
Will Pate

Will Pate

Associate Artist Manager

Representation

General management for opera with Askonas Holt

Follow Deborah

Season Highlights

Sep 2025 - Sep 2025
Opera di Roma
Britten THE TURN OF THE SCREW (New Production)
Mar 2026 - Mar 2026
Teatro Real, Madrid
Britten A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM (New Production)
May 2026 - May 2026
Royal Ballet & Opera
Britten PETER GRIMES (Revival)

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News

Press

  • Berg - Wozzeck

    Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
    May 2023

    • These days, interpretations of the opera tend to lean towards either the psychological or sociological, but in her new Covent Garden production Deborah Warner finds a perhaps ideal balance. One of Britain’s leading stage directors, Warner is equally at home working in opera as in theatre, and the two converge here in Berg’s music drama. She has staged Wozzeck before, making her operatic debut with it at Opera North in 1993, and if anything this new interpretation feels more timeless.

    • This Wozzeck comes soon after Warner’s Peter Grimes in this house, and it shares that show’s stark vision of the destitute and the marginalised, as well as the director’s minutely calibrated dramaturgy. The swift scene changes are well handled by designer Hyemi Shin, whose grungy, vaguely contemporary settings are offset with expressionist touches: the blood moon, a forest of bare trees. If the staging is not the “radically new vision” of the opera that Warner says she set out to make, it is as unsparing as the work needs to be.

Discography