For Shaw

Over the course of several collaborations, director Deborah Warner and actor Fiona Shaw have established one of theatre's most creative partnerships. Emma Hogan talked to them about critics, violence and their latest production, Samuel Beckett's Happy Days

“I loathe the term ‘suspension of disbelief’. It suggests that theatre is essentially untrue, which is terrible.It is not, no more than any other art.”

Director Deborah Warner’s work is perhaps most clearly marked by this utter integrity and honesty in her approach to theatre. Similarly, the actor Fiona Shaw, who has long collaborated with Warner, feels that “when I’m acting I’m not trying to fool anyone. I am actually doing the real thing”.

This search for capturing the essence of a play – not trying to explain it or entangle it in academia, but instead to release it from the bounds of definition and convention – has led to Warner and Shaw producing consistently striking and original work, as in their current production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. Having toured with the piece for the past year and a half, even performing it as the first modern play in any language at Epidaurus, they have now brought it to the legendary Abbey Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Yet it was a play that Warner “never had an ambition to direct”. It was also “the unhappiest and most distressing rehearsal period – almost impossible. For so many reasons”. (“And so many weeks!” adds Shaw).

Happy Days is, in many respects, an incredibly difficult play: Winnie, the main (perhaps only) character talks in fits and starts. Half-snatches of conversation or song float in while she remains buried up to her waist, then neck, in the ground. Yet in their production Warner and Shaw have created such vitality of character that it seems as if the stage is full of people and movement, all through Shaw's solitary performance. Warner believes that as a play it is a “two-hander between Winnie and the audience. We did not find the play in rehearsal. What released it for me was the first preview at the National, the first outing with an audience”. Shaw’s Winnie is captivating and occasionally saddening. “She is, in a way, an actress,” says Shaw, who thought that the part “initially sounded like my mother. But then most characters I play are based on my mother; she is in that way my inadvertent guide. Yet you would be trapped if you made this play just about her.”

Instead, Warner and Shaw have found that the production changes and evolves with every performance, and every audience, according with Warner’s belief that “exciting theatre is really open, when audience members can enter it on multiple different levels and experience it very, very differently – and not be a grey or wishy-washy event because of that. But Beckett leaves the way open for that completely. He wants different experiences to occur within the night of it being watched. But I think the energy of good theatre lies in the possibility of not being told what it means. Theatre lets you look at what you want, unlike cinema”.

For Warner and Shaw, theatre seems to be something that should not only be done with integrity, but also with a constant sense of questioning, pushing the definitions of what drama can be. In 1995 they collaborated on a piece performing T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, questioning the “redundant” boundaries between theatre and performance art. Such a bold work is not unusual for both actor and director. Neither seems afraid of taking risks; indeed, they seem to relish a challenge for what it can do for theatre. Shaw has played Richard II, the child-murdering Medea and a host of other challenging, unconventional parts, while Warner gathered a one-hundred-strong cast for her production of Julius Caesar at the Barbican (with Shaw as Portia) and has directed both opera and what some would term ‘installation art’ with her Angels Project in London and New York.

Such awe-inspiring careers were marked with equally stratospheric beginnings. After reading Philosophy at the University of Cork (“and as little as possible of it as I could”), Shaw went on to train at RADA under the legendary artistic director Hugh Crutwell: “It was a gorgeous place. There I knew what it was that I wanted to do, and I worked hard at it.”
Warner, meanwhile, went on to study at Central School of Speech and Drama after sixth form, and formed her own production company KICK at the age of 21, running it from the telephone box outside her London flat. Aged 27, she joined the RSC, where she became known for her 1989 production of Titus Andronicus, which had audience members fainting on a nightly basis, some even before the violence had started.

Though raised a Quaker and pacifist, Warner is interested by what happens when violence occurs on stage, “the safest place for it to be”.  Yet though the stage is a safe environment, it is also an establishment that Warner and Shaw manage to query and shake up. In doing so, they have not always met with favorable reviews, and Shaw sums up her experience fairly: “Theatre critics have potentially a very responsible job. I’m not sure it’s a job they can fill easily if they feel that responsibility. But the generation of critics I have been exposed to is, like most people, worryingly variable. The mean-spirited, jealous person is far too prevalent. We have no right to reply, either. In that way it is an unhealthy relationship – the critic is claiming to be the voice of the audience but often is not at all.” Warner similarly believes that critics “should be exercised regularly, moving from theatre reviews to film to visual arts. They are very intelligent people. But we are in a little bit of need of a leader right now who is excited by theatre, by the new”.

Later that day, I found that Happy Days had come under a particularly petty review by the Irish Times. Yet watching that evening’s performance, all of the integrity, excitement and intensity that Warner and Shaw hoped to convey came through, refuting the lone critic. Instead, the performance achieved what Shaw described The Wasteland as doing for her, what great art should do: “making you look at life again, differently.”