My Journey: Matthew Warchus
Matthew Warchus knew the National Youth Theatre first as a young actor and then as a director. Growing up in Yorkshire, far from a professional theatre, he built pantomime sets at York Theatre Royal, became a founder member of the Selby branch of Youth Theatre Yorkshire, and acted with the NYT as a teenager. After graduating from Bristol University, he returned to the NYT to direct. Artistic director Edward Wilson gave him one of his first chances to direct, and the NYT’s production list records Warchus directing Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide at the Bloomsbury Theatre in 1989. He followed it with Coriolanus at the Tramway in Glasgow in 1990, revived at the Bloomsbury in 1991. Those two NYT productions led directly to assistant director jobs at Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company, launching one of the most successful directing careers in British theatre.
Matthew Warchus was born in Rochester, Kent, on 24 October 1966. His father had been an actor before becoming a vicar. Warchus studied music and drama, graduating in 1988, and only considered a career in the arts towards the end of his degree. His directing debut was Ben Jonson’s Sejanus: His Fall at the Edinburgh Festival, and he later became an associate director at West Yorkshire Playhouse.
His production of Yasmina Reza’s Art ran in the West End for seven years; the play won Olivier and Evening Standard awards for Best Play and brought him a first Tony nomination in New York. He directed Henry V, Hamlet and The Devil is an Ass for the RSC and Volpone at the National, and later Matilda the Musical, which won seven Olivier Awards in 2012, including Best Director, and five Tonys in 2013. On film he co-wrote and directed Simpatico (1999), starring Nick Nolte, Jeff Bridges, Albert Finney and Sharon Stone, and directed Pride (2014).
In 2015 he succeeded Kevin Spacey as artistic director of the Old Vic. Over 11 years he gave 25 works their world premiere, led the theatre through the Covid shutdown with its live-streamed In Camera season, and staged an annual A Christmas Carol written by fellow NYT alumnus Jack Thorne. He stepped down in 2026 and was succeeded by Rupert Goold.