Change of direction for Warner

An invitation to direct a big-budget movie is the most glamorous a humble theatre director can get. In the first week of May, Deborah Warner joins that elite list. Her new film, The Last September, is the latest addition to the recent small, but glittering, heap of debuts by British theatre directors.

Modern Hollywood usually regards theatre with as much enthusiasm as cold porridge. It wasn't always thus. George Cukor and Elia Kazan traipsed between Broadway and Hollywood like travelling salesmen. But that was decades ago, when studios still suffered proscenium-arch envy, and film schools hadn't been invented. Technology, special effects and the arrival of film geeks such as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas pushed mainstream cinema far beyond the reach of meddling thespians.

But the unexpected success of films including The Madness of King George (Nicholas Hytner), Trainspotting (Danny Boyle), The English Patient (Anthony Minghella) and latterly American Beauty (Sam Mendes) have gradually forced the studios to reassess the uneasy relationship. Disney, DreamWorks, and Miramax are alert to the allure of theatrical credibility. It was only a matter of time before an enlightened producer (Neil Jordan) approached Deborah Warner, a young and brilliant director with a startling list of hits at the RSC (Titus Andronicus, Electra), the Royal National Theatre (King Lear), and the Royal Opera House (Turn of the Screw).

The two staples in Warner's career are her prolific work with actress Fiona Shaw and her taste for strong meat: tough classics, grandstanding bits of opera, and ghostly site-specific experiments. For someone who has made their reputation in these rarefied climes, Warner is surprisingly earthy. She combines intuition and intelligence with an easy sense of humour. The bob of hair is as immaculately styled as her designer clothes. The big brown eyes are full of wary mischief. And years of working with Shaw have left a telltale Irish lilt.

When Jordan offered her the script for The Last September, based on a novel by Elizabeth Bowen, Warner was "gripped by the story and absolutely ashamed I'd never heard of her". Set within the shade and shelter of a country house in Cork, 1916, The Last September promises nothing more remarkable than an 18-year-old girl's first steps to womanhood. But this cool, wistful comedy of manners conceals fears about the end of British rule in Ireland that ring all too harshly today.

In the film, a family of eccentric Anglo-Irish aristocrats, led by Michael Gambon and Maggie Smith, await the changes that will bring their privileged lifestyle crashing around their ankles.

Sandwiched between British Army officers, and redneck Republicans, the family project their uneasy worries on the romantic fate of their ravishing, wilful young niece, Lois (Keeley Hawes). Will she fall for the British captain (David Tennant), or the local terrorist (Gary Lydon)? It's a witty, melancholy scenario, and a sepia-tinted snapshot of Bowen's own true past.

"The film," says Warner, "works upon the imagination in the way Chekhov's great country house dramas anticipated the end of feudal Russia. The fate of the Anglo-Irish is an astonishing story." Yet it's a piece of history that was utterly overshadowed by the distant blasts and slaughter in the trenches. "The Last September is really the uncharted history of a largely forgotten breed," explains Warner. "It's a point in history when these doomed Anglo-Irish families were left to fend for themselves. The more one hears about it, the more incredible the stories are. Of the 900 big houses in Bowen's corner of north Cork in 1916, only 150 were left by the end of the 1920s. Ironically, Bowen's own house - Bowen's Court - survived the troubles and was then pulled down by a curmudgeonly farmer in the 1960s."

Intriguingly, the loyalties of the film lie with the tribal Irish, rather than, as Warner puts it, "the bemused baffled British soldiers from another planet. Most of the soldiers drafted in were the shell-shocked remains of front-line duty in Europe. Can you imagine going through that appalling war, and then being shipped to Cork to police the unpoliceable? They had little idea who, or what, they were meant to be fighting in Ireland."

The result, in the film, is a large-scale social tragedy played out with comic ineptitude. The lavish period detail does nothing to soften the searing topicality. What kept cast morale high were the antics of Dame Maggie Smith and Fiona Shaw, pretending to be two River-dance fans. "We stayed in this big private house at night with a huge dining room," says Warner. "And Jane (Birkin), me, Michael (Gambon) and Maggie, would sit on one side of the table while Fiona did her Irish jigging on the other. I'd never seen anything like it before. It's sort of faintly obscene. Everything about it looks wrong. Maggie would simply weep with hysterics. "I was very moved having Maggie and Fiona together in a film. The thrill of assembling a cast like this is what makes film so massively attractive. Theatre just doesn't allow that to happen, perhaps by virtue of the way plays are written, or sadly by virtue of our funding system ... which doesn't make actors naturally say yes."