Factory Birds
The Fair Maid of the West
The Family Reunion
Lynn Farleigh
George Farquhar
David Farr
Farrah
Nicholas Farrell
Mia Farrow
Fashion
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Faust
Ray Fearon
Michael Feast
Jules Feiffer
Emma Fielding
Joseph Fiennes
Ralph Fiennes
Geraldine Fitzgerald
Peter Flannery
James Fleet
Susan Fleetwood
John Fletcher
Flight
The Fool
Footfalls
John Ford
Oliver Ford Davies
The Forest
Emilia Fox
Philip Franks
Paul Freeman
Geoffrey Freshwater
Max Frisch
Frozen Assets
Christopher Fry
Athol Fugard
It was during the 1991 Edinburgh Fringe Festival that David Farr emerged as one of the bright new hopes of the British theatre. Just down from Cambridge with a first in English, Farr arrived in Edinburgh with two devised plays, one performed by his own company, Talking Tongues, the other by the Cambridge Mummers. Talking Tongues' show, Slight Possession, a duet for two girls performed on and around stepladders, was raw and erotic (one of the girls was Rachel Weisz). The Mummers' surreal Glue Wedding consisted of silent action performed to music by Murray Gold. The style of both shows was hauntingly oblique.
Stephen Daldry invited Talking Tongues to perform Slight Possession, along with another short piece called The Detour, at the Gate in London (1992). Weisz left to make a television series, but Farr kept the company going for another year, devising and directing Hove (NT Cottesloe, 1993) and Liars, Fakers and People Being Honest (BAC, 1993). He continued to work at the Gate, first as an associate and then (from 1995) as artistic director: Botho Strauss's Seven Doors (1992); Strindberg's The Great Highway (1993); Gil Vicente's The Boat Plays (1994—the auditorium was transformed into a wooden boat); Ramón del Valle-Inclán's Silverface and Ballad of Wolves (1995); Stig Larsson's Sisters, Brothers (1996); Voltaire's Candide (1997); and Büchner's Danton's Death (1997).
Farr's plays of the 1990s were Max Klapper: a Life in Pictures (Electric Cinema, 1996); the humane and humorous Elton John's Glasses (Terry Johnson, Watford Palace, 1997, West End, 1998); The Nativity (Young Vic, 1999-00); and a modern, east London re-telling of Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment in Dalston (Arcola Theatre, 2002). In 2001 he worked at the RSC for the first time, directing Jody Watson in his own dramatic monologue The Thoughts of Joan of Arc on the English as She Burns at the Stake (Young Vic, 2001). This was followed by Night of the Soul—a businessman staying in a modern hotel encounters the ghost of a young woman, a plague victim (Farr directed Tom Mannion and Zoë Waites, Pit, 2002); a stylish Kurosawa-inspired Coriolanus (Swan and Small-scale Tour, 2003-04); and a modern dress Julius Caesar (Swan and Small-scale Tour, 2004-05).
Shakespeare has become a passion. As joint Artistic Director of the Bristol Old Vic (2003-05), he directed first-rate productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream (2003), The Comedy of Errors (2003) and Twelfth Night (2004), as well as his own versions of Paradise Lost (2004) and The Odyssey (2005). In 2005 he left Bristol to succeed Neil Bartlett at the Lyric Hammersmith.
Education: Trinity Hall, Cambridge
RSC: Joined 2001
Productions: The Thoughts of Joan of Arc on the English as She Burns at the Stake, David Farr (Young Vic, 2001); Night of the Soul, David Farr (Pit, 2002); Coriolanus (Swan, 2002-03/Small-scale Tour, 2003/Old Vic, 2003); Julius Caesar (Swan and Small-scale Tour, 2004-05)
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