Janet Dale
Timothy Dalton
Charles Dance
The Dance of Death
Ron Daniels
The Danton Affair
Nick Darke
Daughter of the Air
Shaun Davey
Alan David
Howard Davies
Rudi Davies
Daniel Day-Lewis
Days in the Trees
Days of the Commune
The Dead Monkey
Nick Dear
Deathwatch/The Maids
Thomas Dekker
Robert Delamere
A Delicate Balance
Frances de la Tour
Robert Demeger
Jeffery Dench
Judi Dench
The Desert Air
Desire Under the Elms
Destiny
The Devil is an Ass
The Devil's Disciple
The Devils
Ann Devlin
Es Devlin
Mark Dignam
Stephen Dillane
The Dillen
Lisa Dillon
Dingo
The Dispute
Divine Gossip
Joe Dixon
Doctor Faustus
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
The Dog in the Manger
Monica Dolan
A Doll's House
Don Carlos
Donmar Warehouse
Declan Donnellan
Gregory Doran
Simon Dormandy
Roy Dotrice
John Dougall
Wayne Dowdeswell
Downchild
Penny Downie
Kevin Doyle
A Dream of People
Dreamplay
Amanda Drew
Darrell D'Silva
Kate Duchêne
The Duchess of Malfi
Duck Song
William Dudley
The Dumb Waiter
Lindsay Duncan
Jeremy Dunn
Marguerite Duras
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Susan Dury
Dutch Uncle
The Dybbuk
Charles Dyer
Chris Dyer
Howard Davies worked as a stage manager at the Bristol Old Vic before the company's head, Val May, gave him a production to direct—Edward Bond's Narrow Road to the Deep South. He was subsequently made an associate director with responsibility for the Old Vic Studio. He directed Simon Moore in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Paul Eddington in Long Day's Journey into Night, and Anna Calder-Marshall in Troilus and Cressida. The plays of political English writers like Edward Bond and the modern classics of American theatre have remained at the centre of his work.
One of Davies's late night shows at the Old Vic Studio was a drama-documentary by David Illingworth based on the Oz trial. The RSC's Buzz Goodbody saw the show and acquired the work for the Company's season at The Place in London (1971). Through this connection Davies eventually joined the RSC as an assistant director, working on productions by John Barton (King John) and David Jones, and staging Snoo Wilson's The Beast at The Place (1974). He worked with Goodbody to open The Other Place in Stratford (Brecht's Man is Man, 1975), and after her untimely death Trevor Nunn placed him in charge of the RSC's new play policy: it was in this role, as director of the Warehouse, that he made his most important contribution. From 1977 to 1982 the RSC ran the Warehouse as a theatre dedicated to innovative and challenging new work. Plays by Edward Bond, Howard Barker and Howard Brenton shared the stage with revivals of Brecht, Shakespeare and the occasional rarity. Davies supported the writer, served the text and never self-advertised.
As well as remaining doggedly faithful to those difficult masters Bond and Barker by directing revivals of Bingo (1976) and The Fool (1980) and the premieres of The Bundle (1977) and The Loud Boy's Life (1980), Davies fashioned hits from three quality middlebrow entertainments: Pam Gem's Piaf (1978), C.P. Taylor's Good (1981) and Christopher Hampton's Les liaisons dangereuses (1985) all transferred to the West End and eventually to Broadway. As a director more interested in contemporary plays than in the classics, Davies was almost unique within the RSC. During his twelve years with the Company he only directed three of Shakespeare's plays in the main house, Macbeth with Bob Peck and Sara Kestelman (1982), Henry VIII with Richard Griffiths and John Thaw (1983), and Troilus and Cressida (1985) with Anton Lesser and Juliet Stevenson. Of the three, Troilus was the most unusual and revealing. If Davies's instincts are for literal readings, on this occasion he took an imaginative leap and transposed Shakespeare's bitterly cynical account of the Trojan War to the conflict between England and Russia in the Crimea (1850s). The result was to bring home the universality of Shakespeare's view of war. The emblematic décor, suggesting a dilapidated mansion, was striking in itself but eventually limiting since it had to serve for both camps and all scenes. The decision to depict Cressida (Juliet Stevenson) as unambiguously virtuous ran counter to the text, but Davies's final image of Pandarus playing plangent notes on a piano as the battle raged outside was unforgettable.
One senses that Davies was never entirely happy at the RSC after the closure of the Warehouse and the move to the Barbican. One also senses that his interests shifted during the 1980s; he stopped directing Brecht, Bond and other playwrights of the political left and sought a theatre of lightness, feeling, poetry and pure entertainment. After directing Brian Cox in John Whiting's A Penny for a Song on the Barbican's main stage (1986) he left the RSC for the National, where he began with a crowd-pleasing revival of Dion Boucicault's expert piece of blarney, The Shaughraun (1988). Inspired by the Olivier's revolving stage, Davies's designer, Bill Dudley, created a picturesque Irish cliff top and cottage that rose like a telescope and span like a spinning wheel. Davies directed the play as a sophisticated pantomime. Continuing at the National he was suddenly eclectic, directing Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1989), David Hare's The Secret Rapture (1989), Shaw's Pygmalion (1992), Schiller's Mary Stuart (1996), and Wesker's Chips With Everything (1997), as well as two modern American classics—Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1988), and Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1990). American theatre has become his specialty in the sense that it has inspired his finest recent work—Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1996) and Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (1998) at the Almeida; O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra at the National (2003-04). As one of Nicholas Hytner's associates at the National, he has also directed Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (2004), Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba (2005), and Brecht's Galileo (2006). In 1996 he returned to the RSC to direct Richard Nelson's The General from America in the Swan.
Education: Christ's Hospital; Durham University; Bristol University
RSC: Joined 1974; Assistant Director, 1974; Associate Director, 1977-86; Artistic Director of the Warehouse, 1977-82; Honorary Associate Director (since 1991)
Productions: I Was Shakespeare's Double, John Downie (TOP, 1974); The Beast, Snoo Wilson (The Place, 1974); Man is Man, Bertolt Brecht (TOP, 1975/Roudhouse, 1976); Schweyk in the Second World War, Bertolt Brecht (TOP, 1976/Warehouse, 1977); The Iceman Cometh (Aldwych, 1976); Bingo, Edward Bond (TOP, 1976/Warehouse, 1977); Bandits, C.P. Taylor (Warehouse, 1977); Days of the Commune, Bertolt Brecht (Aldwych, 1977); The Bundle, Edward Bond (Warehouse, 1977); Piaf, Pam Gems (TOP, 1978/Warehouse, 1979/Aldwych, 1979/New York, 1980); The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, David Edgar (Warehouse, 1978/TOP, 1979); The Adventures of Awful Knawful, Peter Flannery, Mick Ford, co-directed with John Caird (Warehouse, 1978); The Innocent, Tom McGrath (Warehouse, 1979); Much Ado About Nothing (Small-scale Tour, 1979/Warehouse, 1980); The Loud Boy's Life, Howard Barker (Warehouse, 1980); The Fool, Edward Bond (TOP, 1980/Warehouse, 1981); No Limits to Love, David Mercer (Warehouse, 1980); Outskirts, Hanif Kureishi (Warehouse, 1981); Good, C.P. Taylor (Warehouse, 1981/Aldwych, 1982/New York, 1982); Macbeth (RST, 1982/Barbican, 1983); The Time of Your Life, William Saroyan (TOP, 1983/Pit, 1984); Henry VIII (RST, 1983/Barbican, 1984); Softcops, Caryl Churchill (Pit, 1984); The Party, Trevor Griffiths (TOP, 1984/Pit, 1985); Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht (Barbican, 1984); Troilus and Cressida (RST, 1985/Barbican, 1986); Les liaisons dangereuses, Christopher Hampton (TOP, 1985/Pit, 1986); Flight, David Lan (TOP, 1986/Pit, 1987); A Penny for a Song, John Whiting (Barbican, 1986); The General from America, Richard Nelson (Swan, 1996/Pit, 1997)
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