DeborahWarner
- Director
About Deborah
Deborah Warner CBE is a world-renowned British director of theatre and opera.
Deborah’s recent engagements include an Olivier Award winning production of Billy Budd for the Teatro Real Madrid, the Royal Opera House and the Opera di Roma; Messiah for the Opéra de Lyon; Wozzeck for the Royal Opera House and Peter Grimes for the Teatro Real Madrid, co-produced with the Royal Opera, the Opéra national de Paris and the Opera di Roma, where it will be seen in the 2024/25 season.
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. She will revive the production during the 2024/25 season at the Linbury Theatre at the Royal Opera House.
She has directed The Turn of the Screw for the Royal Opera House at the Barbican, which won her an Evening Standard and South Bank Award. She has 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.
Representation
News
Deborah Warner’s Phaedra/Minotaur opens at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre starring Christine Rice
Deborah Warner’s Peter Grimes opens at Opera di Roma
Royal Opera 2024/25 season to feature 22 Askonas Holt artists
Deborah Warner’s Wozzeck premieres at Royal Opera House
Deborah Warner's Peter Grimes opens at Royal Opera House
Deborah Warner’s Peter Grimes premieres at Teatro Real Madrid
Press
Berg - Wozzeck
Royal Opera House, Covent GardenMay 2023These 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.
- John Allison, The Daily Telegraph
- 20 May 2023
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.
- Neil Fisher, The Times
- 21 May 2023
Deborah Warner’s Wozzeck premieres at Royal Opera House
Award-winning director Deborah Warner premieres her new production of Berg’s Wozzeck this evening at the Royal Opera House. Conducted by Antonio Pappano, the cast includes new Askonas Holt signing John Findon alongside Christian Gerhaher, Anja Kampe, Peter Hoare and Brindley Sherratt.
The production follows her critically-acclaimed Royal Opera House stagings of Peter Grimes and Billy Budd, with the latter winning an Olivier Award, an International Opera Award and a Critic’s Circle award, as well as a Diapason d’Or and a BBC Music Magazine Award for the DVD. Deborah’s Peter Grimes has been staged at the Opéra National de Paris and Teatro Real Madrid, with future revivals planned for 2024/25 and beyond.
In a recent interview with the Telegraph, Deborah recalled how Wozzeck was her introduction to opera direction when she was asked to stage it at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1991. “I was so young, so unaware, so innocent of the form,” she said. “But the sheer brilliance of the piece was on my side and rereading the reviews now, I can sense that some of its visceral power must have been released in those performances.”
This summer, she brings her double-bill of Phaedra and Minotaur to the Edinburgh International Festival. The project began as part of the Royal Opera House’s 4x4 series with an Olivier-award nomination for Christine Rice, before it was adapted for the Ustinov Theatre Bath, where Deborah is Artistic Director.
Earlier this month, she announced the theatre’s 2023-24 season, which includes a new recital series that includes Askonas Holt artists Christine Rice, Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake.
