Theatre director who founded the Donmar Warehouse
Howard Davies 1945-2016
Howard Davies, who has died aged 71, was “quite simply one of the great postwar theatre directors”, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. He directed the original 1985 production of Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, extracting performances from Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan that “glistened like a stiletto blade”; then reunited the pair for a sizzling West End revival of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, 16 years later. Revealing the passion and pain of a couple who can neither live together nor apart, his production did much to “rescue Coward from his fusty Saturday matinee reputation”, said The Daily Telegraph. But Davies was also considered one of the great interpreters of American drama: in 1988, he directed an acclaimed National Theatre revival of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, starring Duncan and Ian Charleson; a decade later, he persuaded Kevin Spacey to come to London, to play the lead in Eugene O’neill’s The Iceman Cometh.
The son of a miner, Davies grew up in Co Durham, and began producing his own plays aged eight. “None of the other kids wanted to be in them,” he said. “I had to bribe them with cheap Woodbine cigarettes.” He won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital School, then studied at Durham and Bristol universities. His first theatrical job was as a stage manager at the Bristol Old Vic. His interest then was mainly in “fringe agitprop”, and his friends, he recalled, “spat” at him when he accepted Trevor Nunn’s offer of a job at the RSC. He’d told Nunn he wanted to direct new works – and was told to go and find a venue. In 1977, he opened The Warehouse, in Covent Garden, which later became the Donmar Warehouse. He spent five years there; then – from 1988 – 28 years at the National. He won three Oliviers, for The White Guard, The Iceman Cometh and All My Sons.
Davies got on well with his actors, said The Times, but he didn’t mix in “luvvie” circles. “I’m not the sort who lives and breathes theatre,” he told an interviewer in 1997. “I like going home at 6pm. I suppose I am not glamorous.” A high point of his career, he once said, was “the first time I took my daughters to see my productions, and knew they’d really enjoyed them”. He’s survived by his two daughters, and his second wife, actress Clare Holman.