Lunchtime Look In - Happy Days
Join the adventure and experience the rich array of artistry behind the great performances on stage at the Kennedy Center.
Gain insight into Samuel Beckett's two-person masterpiece. Produced by Explore the Arts™ and moderated by Leslie Jacobson, Chair of the Department of Theatre & Dance at George Washington University.
Happy Days
Fiona Shaw
“Winnie”
Fiona Shaw trained at RADA. Her work in theater includes Julius Caesar at the Barbican; The Rivals, The Good Person of Sichuan (London Critics’ Award for Best Actress 1990), Machinal (Oliver and Evening Standard Awards for Best Actress 1993), the title role in Richard II, Millament in The Way of the World, the title role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and PowerBook at the National; As You Like It, Philistines, Les Liaisons Dangéreuses, Mephisto, Hyde Park, The Taming of the Shrew, New Inn, and small scale tours of Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice and Electra (Oliver Award for Best Actress 1990) for the RSC; Love’s Labour’s Lost at Bolton Octagon; Bloody Poetry for Foco Novo; Mary Stuart at Greenwich Theatre; As You Like It at the Old Vic (Olivier Award for Best Actress 1990); and the title roles in Hedda Gabler at the Playhouse from the Abbey Theatre, Dublin (London Critics’ Award 1991), and Electra at Riverside Studios, in Paris and on U.K. tour. She also starred in Beckett’s Footfalls at the Garrick; Eliot’s The Waste Land at Wilton’s Music Hall, London and on tour in Canada, New York, Paris, Australia, Norway, and Germany; and in Readings at the Theâtre National de Chaillot and in Rome, all directed by Deborah Warner. Other recent work includes Woman and Scarecrow at the Royal Court, and, at Lincoln Center, New York, Death, Destruction and Detroit III for Robert Wilson. As director: Widowers’ Houses for NT Education mobile tour and in the Cottesloe. Her TV appearances include: Love Song, Maria’s Child,Persuasion, Fireworks for Elspeth, For The Greater Good, Hedda Gabler, Persuasion, Gormenghast, and Mindgames. Her films include Catch and Release, The Black Dahlia, Anna Karenina, Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, Harry Potter and The The Prisoner Of Azkaban, Jane Eyre, My Left Foot, The Butcher Boy, The Last September, The Triumph Of Love, Mountains of the Moon, My Left Foot, Three Men and A Little Lady, London Kills Me, Super Mario Bros., Underground Blues, The Avengers, RKO 281, and Skin and Blister. She has honorary degrees from the National University of Ireland, the Open University and Trinity College, Dublin; was awarded L’Officier des Arts et des Lettres in 2000; and made an honorary CBE in 2001.
Deborah Warner
Director
Deborah Warner’s work in theater includes: The Good Person of Szechuan, Woyzeck, The Tempest, Measure for Measure, King Lear, and Coriolanus for Kick Theatre Company; Titus Andronicus (Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Direction), King John, and Electra for the RSC; The Good Person of Sichuan, King Lear, Richard II (French Critics’ Best Foreign Production), The PowerBook for the National Theatre; Hedda Gabler (Olivier Awards for Direction and Production) at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin and Playhouse Theatre, London; Beckett’s Footfalls at the Garrick Theatre, London; Coriolanus with Bruno Ganz at Salzburg Festival; Une Maison de Poupée at the Odéon, Paris; Medea (Evening Standard Award for Direction, three Tony nominations and two Obies) at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin and Queen’s Theatre, London, also U.S. tour and Broadway; and three devised installation pieces—The St Pancras Project, The Tower Project for LIFT, and The Angel Project for Perth International Arts Festival and Lincoln Center Festival. Her production of The Waste Land with Fiona Shaw visited Brussels, Dublin, Paris, Montreal, Toronto, Brighton, Adelaide, Bergen, Perth, London—at Wilton’s Music Hall (where it was the first live theater event since the theater closed in the nineteenth century)—and the Liberty Theatre, New York, where it won two New York Drama Desk Awards. Most recently she directed Julius Caesar at the Barbican, starring Ralph Fiennes, Anton Lesser, Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw, which toured to Paris, Madrid, and Luxembourg; and Readings with Fiona Shaw for Fitzroy Productions at the Theâtre National de Chaillot. Opera includes: La Voix Humaine and Wozzeck for Opera North; Don Giovanni and Fidelio at Glyndebourne; Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher for BBC Proms; The Turn of the Screw (Evening Standard and South Bank Show Awards) for the Royal Opera House; Diary of One Who Vanished for ENO at the Dublin Festival, Bobigny, Holland Festival, Lincoln Center New York and at the National; St John Passion for ENO, The Rape of Lucretia for Bayerische Opera, Munich, Dido and Aeneas for William Christie/Les Arts Florissants at the Vienna Festival; and Death in Venice with Ian Bostridge for ENO. Television includes Hedda Gabler, Richard II, and The St John Passion. Films include The Waste Land (Un Certain Regard, Cannes Film Festival) and The Last September (Official Selection Director’s Fortnight, Cannes, Toronto and Edinburgh Film Festivals). She was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres by the French government in 1992 and L’Officier des Arts et des Lettres in 2000, and was made a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2006.
Leslie Jacobson
Moderator
Leslie Jacobson is the founding Artistic Director of Horizons Theatre, now embarking on its 30th year of production. As a playwright, director, and teacher, Jacobson has committed her 30-plus years in the professional theatre to creating and producing work that addresses many of the issues which plague our contemporary society – issues of sexism, racism, homophobia, and other de-humanizing methods of categorizing the individual. In the past four years, she has been working with a community in Winterfeldt, South Africa, creating theatre with at-risk youth. She has been nominated three times for Helen Hayes Awards in the category of Outstanding Direction. Jacobson enjoys creating theatre in non-traditional spaces, and has done so at the Smithsonian, the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum, the Air and space Museum, and the United States Senate. She is the Chair of the Department of Theatre & Dance at The George Washington University.
