Howard Davies

Stephen Howard Davies CBE was a multi award winning British theatre, television director and dramatist.

In the early 1970s, Davies worked extensively with the Bristol Old Vic and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and served as an associate director for both the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he directed Les liaisons dangereuses, Macbeth, and Troilus and Cressida.

My big breakthrough came, when Trevor Nunn (Director) gave me the chance to set up the Warehouse theatre in London's Covent Garden, which is now the Donmar Warehouse. I'd persuaded him that the Royal Shakespeare Company should have a policy of putting on new plays; he said, "All right then – you find a theatre, and you do it." I ended up running it for five years.

He worked extensively for the Royal National Theatre, where his projects included Hedda Gabler, The House of Bernarda Alba, Pygmalion, The Crucible, The Shaughraun and Paul. It was also where he directed Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard which opened in May 2011 and was broadcast on 30 June 2011 as part of National Theatre Live. 

His opera credits include Idomeneo, The Italian Girl in Algiers, Eugene Onegin and I due Foscari and he directed the opera-related play After Aida 1985–86 in Wales and at the Old Vic Theatre.

Davies' work in West End theatre won him the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director for The Iceman Cometh, All My Sons and The White Guard. He received the London Critics Circle Award for Best Director for Mourning Becomes Electra and The Iceman Cometh and the Evening Standard Award for Best Director for All My Sons and Flight.

Davies made his Broadway debut with Piaf in 1981. His Broadway credits also include Les liaisons dangereuses, the 1990 revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the 1993 revival of My Fair Lady, Translations, the 1999 revival of The Iceman Cometh, the 2002 revival of Private Lives and the 2007 revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten.

I think what happens when you are in your teens or early twenties is that you define yourself by being opposed to what you see around you, opposed to the rules of the system that you’re working in, be it school or university or college, or to the rules that your parents set down. You define yourself by breaking those rules, by challenging those rules.

At the Almeida Theatre he directed Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Play About the Baby, whilst at the Hampstead Theatre he directed the 2012 premiere of 55 Days.

Davies was awarded a CBE in the 2011 New Year Honours List for services to drama.

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