Howard Davies, who has died aged 71, was quite simply one of the great post war British theatre directors. He mined texts exhaustively, was deeply sensitive to actors and ensured theatre was a memorable visual experience. At a time when directing plays is often equated with exhibitionistic self-display or concept-mongering, Davies was a classic example of the director as interpreter of an author’s intentions.
What was startling was his own growth from radical young Turk into a director who effortlessly combined the personal and the political. Having been put in charge by Trevor Nunn of the RSC’s Warehouse theatre (now the Donmar) in Covent Garden in 1977, Davies produced an astonishing 35 plays in five years. He directed many of them himself, including work by Bertolt Brecht, Edward Bond, Hanif Kureishi and CP Taylor, turning a former rehearsal room into a powerhouse of creative energy.
During that time he also staged in Stratford the premiere of Pam Gems’s Piaf in which Jane Lapotaire gave a mesmerising performance as the Parisian chanteuse. But undoubtedly the highlight of Davies’s RSC years was his 1985 production of Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He once told me that he had difficulty getting through Laclos’s epistolary novel. You would never have guessed it from his superbly stylish production in which a pair of calculating predators use sex as a weapon of revenge. Davies not only got from Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan (a pair later to be reunited in his West End production of Private Lives) performances that glistened like a stiletto blade, he also suggested that beneath the surface glitter we were watching the last gasp of a doomed class.
It was that ability to unearth the social and political resonances of private behaviour that made Davies a supreme director. It also made him a natural interpreter, when he joined the National Theatre in 1988, of the classic plays of the American repertory. He showed that Eugene O’Neill’s inordinate Mourning Becomes Electra, his version starring Helen Mirren, is a study of both a divided family and a riven nation.
His 2000 production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, revived in the West End 10 years later, rescued the play from melodrama and allowed it to become a portrait of a society swathed in protective illusions. Outside the National, he also directed a landmark production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Almeida in 1996, starring David Suchet and Diana Rigg, that reminded us we were watching a play about the decline of a civilisation.
But one of Davies’s virtues was that he gave actors and designers room to breathe. You saw that in his productions of two monumental Russian pieces, Burnt By the Sun and The White Guard at the National Theatre. In the former, aided by Vicki Mortimer’s design, Davies caught the pathos of a beautiful summer’s day in the dacha of a Red Army officer. And I have never seen the chaos and tumult of civil war better demonstrated than in the latter where Bunny Christie’s design reinforced the visions of Mikhail Bulgakov as author and Davies as director.
Davies was always the loyal associate rather the symbolic figurehead of our two main national companies and never enjoyed a prominent public profile. But he was infinitely more than a reliable lieutenant. Whether directing classic plays or new work by writers as diverse as David Hare, Christopher Hampton, David Edgar or Tom Stoppard, he made the essence of the text manifest. If the hallmark of a great director is to realise a writer’s intentions to the maximum, Davies surely deserves the epithet.
