The Waste Land

In 1995, the director Deborah Warner and the actress Fiona Shaw created their company, Fitzroy Productions, to premiere the theatre version of the celebrated modernist poem by T S Eliot, The Waste Land. This work, which condenses into 33 minutes the intensity and fragmentation of Eliot's masterpiece, comes into being thanks to Fiona Shaw. Alone on the stage, the actress uses an essential force to bring out each verse, each breath of hope and destruction. In what the critics have hailed as an astonishing feat of acting, Fiona Shaw transforms herself into the different voices of this poem which, although written in 1922, still comes across as startlingly modern. The Waste Land has been on tour in the UK, Belgium, France, Norway, Canada and the US. After watching one of the performances, John Heilpern of the New York Observer said he had witnessed "an unforgettable theatre experience and an amazing feat by one of the greatest actresses on either side of the Atlantic'