Deborah Warner: an interview
Producer of English National Opera's Messiah
Deborah Warner is not a regular attender at any Meeting, but she still identifies very strongly with the Quaker faith in which she was raised – and she is emphatic that it has a strong influence on her work as a theatre and opera director. ‘In a flippant sense,’ she says, ‘I related to the little girl in “Fierce Feathers” [Lucy Violet Hodgkin’s 1926 children’s story tale in which Native American warriors storm into a Meeting only to end up joining the Friends in silent worship] – I was always watching butterflies out of the window in meeting, hoping for something dramatic to happen. Then the first play I directed was done ‘in the round’, within a circle of chairs: I don’t think you have to be Freud to see the connection!’
Quaker practices inspire Deborah on a more profound level too, though. ‘My focus in the rehearsal room is total,’ she explains; ‘there is a sense of waiting for the inspiration to come, and of waiting for the spirit of the room to stir the inner consciousness, even of receiving what a performer offers in the way you might receive ministry – and that is perhaps a very Quaker thing. And that I think I did learn as a girl in that little forty by forty Meeting room in Burford.’
Deborah’s father and grandmother were both Quakers and heavily involved in the life of Burford meeting in the Cotswolds. Her father was an antique dealer and collector, who both helped revive Burford Meeting and provided many antiques to Friends House so, unlike many Quakers, she grew up surrounded by religious art, ‘which I think provided a sense of the visual and of the iconography of religion’. Her mother had been the child of Methodist missionaries in Zululand, South Africa – ‘they loved four-hour sermons,’ laughs Deborah, ‘which I’m sure is why she found herself attracted to a Quaker!’ – and had a great love of classical music, which she instilled in her daughter.
This love of music has led her to direct both celebrated and controversial programmes of operatic and religious music, including the recent English National Opera Messiah, which itself contained scenes reminiscent of Quaker Meetings. ‘The section after “Thou Art Gone Up on High”, says Deborah, ‘was how I imagine the early church: as a marvellous place, full of straightforward simplicity and great debate; very much the kind of thing I think Quakers have inherited.’
Deborah’s own sense of religion is complex, though. ‘Having gone to Meeting from the age of four, then to a Quaker school [Sidcot], I did run away from it rather – but I know it pervades who I am completely, and I certainly carry its pacifism with me, and that impresses me to this day very deeply.’ She doesn’t define herself by religion, but says that when she works with the ‘transcendental composers – Handel, Bach, a lot of early religious music’ that she still has a profound sense of the spiritual. ‘I think in many senses, the freedom from the mundane and material that can be found in that music is very much what people also find in a Quaker Meeting, and it is something that is increasingly important in the modern world.’
Her next production is of TS Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’, although whether any Quaker inspiration has entered this Deborah says she doesn’t yet know. But in such a contemplative piece, it seems very likely that her Quakerly ‘stirring of the inner consciousness’ can’t help but be felt: after all as she herself says of the inspiration of her background: ‘we are very much that from which we came, and it would be silly to deny it!’
Joe reports for theartsdesk.com (as Joe Muggs).
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