Royal National Theatre production in the Cottesloe Theatre
Opened 2 Jun 1995
Closed 17 Feb 1996
Total 97 Performances
Toured to:
13 Jan - 28 Jan 1996 - Maison de la culture de Bobigny, Bobigny, France
25 Jul -28 Jul 1996 - Perner Insel Hallein, Salzburg, Austria (Salzburg Festival)
A version of this production was filmed by the BBC as part of BBC 2's 'Performance' season, first shown 22 March 1997.
Extracts of interviews with Fiona Shaw
Claire Armistead interviewing Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw in The Guardian, 31 May 1995
"I find the learning of it very hard", says Shaw, surprisingly. "There's something about the vocabulary, a texture, that's male: all that talk of glory. Richard thinks he's a god. What is fantastic, as a woman, is being allowed to play with the existential contradictions of the universe: being the supreme nothing and the supreme something. To be playing with the theatre of mankind rather than just with joy or grief; with the idea that salvation is one's relationship to death rather than to marriage. There's nothing in the theatre for women that addresses that so directly. Cleopatra is the nearest you get to it".'
Christian Tyler interviewing Fiona Shaw in the Financial Times, 9 December 1995
'She and Warner chose Richard II because the play was not too violent. It was also "a chaste play" and did not raise the "gender question" in any obvious way. "It fills me much more with sorrow than it does with any feelings about the nature of gender. It's about having a sense of yourself as a god so you cannot function as human: that's really where it by-passes the gender issue. I suppose I'm playing into the notion that this pupa has been so fed royal jelly that it has no beard, is soft and female from a life of never having to function as a human - either male or female.'
Other productions in which Fiona Shaw has appeared at the National:
The Rivals
by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Dir. Peter Wood
Olivier 12 April 1983
As Julia Melville
The Good Person of Sichuan
by Bertolt Brecht
trans. by Michael Hofmann
Dir. Deborah Warner
Olivier 28 November 1989
As Shen Te
Machinal
by Sophie Treadwell
Dir. Stephen Daldry
Lyttelton 15 October 1993
As Young Woman
The Way of the World
by William Congreve
Dir. Phyllida Lloyd
Lyttelton 19 October 1995
As Mistress Millamant
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
in a newly revised version by Jay Presson Allen
adapted from the novel by Muriel Spark
Dir: Phyllida Lloyd
Lyttelton 25 June 1998
As Jean Brodie
Other productions directed by Deborah Warner at the National:
The Good Person of Sichuan
by Bertolt Brecht
trans. by Michael Hofmann
Dir. Deborah Warner
Olivier 28 November 1989
King Lear
by William Shakespeare
Dir. Deborah Warner
Lyttelton 26 July 1990
Diary of One Who Vanished
By Leos Janacek, text by Ozef Kalda, english translation by Seamus Heaney
Dir. Deborah Warner
Lyttelton 3 November 1999
Co-production with English National Opera
