In 1992 Declan Donnellan was awarded an Honorary Degree by the University of Warwick. Here is the text of the oration presented in his honour by Carol Chillington Rutter, MA PhD.

Mr. Vice-Chancellor

I am delighted and privileged this morning to present the oration in honour of Mr. Declan Donnellan, co-founder and Artistic Director of Cheek by Jowl theatre company; Associate Director of the National Theatre; inaugural Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company Actors' Academy; one of the most influential directors of Shakespeare on the world stage; writer, adapter, teacher and friend to Warwick, having returned to this place regularly for nearly twenty years.

But hold on a moment. Proposing to honour this man of the theatre, Declan Donnellan, aren't we proposing something rather paradoxical? The university, after all, is a very serious place. Our work, as this august assembly confirms, is the serious work of intellectual achievement, of the advancement of research, science, learning. What are we doing, honouring a man whose work is play? What claims to our serious attention can be made for the theatre?

I would argue, with Martin Esslin, that the theatre is a branch of politics. The theatre "is the place where a nation thinks in front of itself." Then, too, the theatre is the highest public expression of culture. We get things backwards, as Johan Huizinga tells us, if we suppose that civilisation produces play. On the contrary: play precedes civilisation; play is what makes us civilised. The play-ful theatre, then, is a kind of experimental laboratory like other theatres: the lecture theatre, the anatomy theatre; the theatre of war. It offers us a place for cultural improvisation, cultural innovation, a place to explore "what happens if"; "what happens when"; and through that experimentation to produce cultural change.

Shakespeare's Chorus in Henry V makes us wise to this. To tell the story of Harry and Agincourt properly he'd need "a muse of fire", but has to settle for a few bare boards, this "unworthy scaffold", the stage he's on. And yet, the Chorus inspires us to understand that the imaginative space of this theatre, this "wooden-O" whose traffic is fictions, lies, delusions, is, paradoxically, a space where we learn the truth about ourselves, where we "mind true things by what their mockeries be".

In all of these areas, the political, the cultural, the performative, the career of Declan Donnellan has continuously made good theatre's claim to do the serious work of play. And what a remarkable career it's been. Reading English and Law at Cambridge he was headed for a career as a barrister, but, called to the Bar, ignored the summons, kicked over the traces, borrowed £6000, and, with that, in 1981 launched Cheek by Jowl, taking to the road to tour provincial England and learn his craft literally on the hoof.

He didn't go it alone. From the first, Cheek by Jowl was a partnership, both personal and artistic, between Donnellan, as director, and the designer, Nick Omerod. It was Omerod who set the visual signature on Cheek by Jowl, making it instantly recognisable wherever it tours. His genius is a visual poetry of suggestion, of material minimalism. He's the kind of designer who makes you believe you're seeing the copious world of Restoration London "from china houses to sedan chairs" there, in front of you, made up in that assortment of wooden crates, and who constantly requires you to readjust everything you ever thought about the landscape of a play: the Forest of Arden in As You Like It was two banners of green silk and "rustic" Phebe flouncing on in twin set and pearls – with a handbag.

Donnellan and Omerod took the company's name from A Midsummer Night's Dream – not the genial scene where Peter Quince is rehearsing the Athenian Working Men's Am Dram; but that loutish bit, later on, when the rival lovers escort each other off stage, "cheek by jowl", to beat each other up. It's a good name – it speaks to the company's feistiness, its physicality and bare knuckle immediacy. And also to its reputation for iconoclasm, delivering well-aimed kicks up the backside not just of Establishment theatre but the Establishment itself. In those early days of the Thatcherite ascendancy when the subsidised theatre was learning to kow-tow to sponsors and play safe, Cheek by Jowl took risks, "walking in like angels", as one writer put it, "where fools had feared to tread", with wit and spirit challenging injustice and received authority.

Donnellan introduced audiences to a European repertoire never before performed in Britain – plays academics may have read but spectators had never seen, by Lope de Vega and Calderon, Racine and Corneille, Ostrovsky and Lessing. And beyond the mere risky fact of choosing this repertoire Donnellan took risks directing it, putting a political spin on things (if spectators were of a mind to see it). Ostrovsky's A Family Affair, for example, a 19th century Russian satire, its cast, a rout of corrupt scheme merchants, monstrous bourgeoisie and solicitors on the fiddle, Donnellan made also an interrogation of cultural issues closer to home in 1988 London where, as one critic put it, the "rise and rise of the obnoxious ones" looked unstoppable. In 1991, directing the British premier at the National Theatre of Tony Kushner's Angels in America - "a gay fantasia", as it billed itself, "on national themes... that looks at everything from AIDS to McCarthyism" - Donnellan opened up the secret, hypocritical heart of the American Dream to anatomise its incurable disease, national paranoia.

Ten years on, he's still tackling danger head on in the theatre. When September 11 happened, he was already committed to directing the new play, the enigmatically titled Homebody / Kabul, that Tony Kushner had just finished – a play, as it happened, about Afghanistan and the Taliban, a play set, as it happened, in 1998, just after the bombings Clinton ordered on Afghan terrorist camps as reprisals for attacks on American embassies. Did September 11 make Homebody / Kabul redundant, irrelevant? Just the opposite. The play, which opened in New York and came to London before touring Europe this spring and summer, helped clarify politics and issues over-exposed in the media. As Donnellan observed, "Art is something with a frame around it; sometimes, it's some 'thing' we think we know all about, something familiar. What the frame does is to draw our attention to the ambiguities within the frame".

Donnellan's internationalism cuts in all directions. He directed The Winter's Tale in Russian at the Maly Theatre, St. Petersburg – then toured the production to England (and Warwick) with surtitles. He directed Corneille's Le Cid at Avignon and Pushkin's Boris Godunov at the Moscow Arts Theatre. He brought Angels from America and has taken Shakespeare around the world.

That's all splendid, but as a Shakespearean, I celebrate even more Donnellan's achievement in transforming the way we see the playwright actors call "Billy Big Boy", on the English stage. Exposing Shakespeare to Donnellan has been rather like plunging him into a therapeutic bath of nitromorse – scouring off centuries of dead convention, inherited tradition and academic dogma, returning him to something like the "wooden-O". While, over the past two decades, other directors have been putting more and more stuff on stage, making Shakespeare all about production, Donnellan strips the stage to bare essentials, returning Shakespeare to his actors, making the play about actors working through speech, and letting spectators into the purest of theatrical pleasures, up close, watching actors, as role players, in-bodied, tell a cracking good story. Nobody who saw it will ever forget Cheek by Jowl's all male As You Like It, and the look Adrian Lester's Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, gave Orlando when she called out to him in Arden and he turned – and took her for a boy! And one more achievement for Shakespeare: while other companies were dithering about the politics of colour-blind casting, wondering whether in multi-racial Britain it was time "finally" to do something as radical as casting a black actor as Othello, Donnellan cut through all the nonsense, instituting fully integrated casting for all Shakespeare roles – the effect of which is not just to claim those parts for black and asian actors, but in multi-ethnic Britain, to claim Shakespeare for everybody. "The theatre is lies – complete lies". So says Declan Donnellan. But he also says, "theatrical lying is vitally important because it's through that that we can tell each other the truth". We want our lives "to be safe, so we go to the theatre to see something dangerous", to "investigate a fantasy", to "experiment with extremities". It is because Declan Donnellan leads us fearlessly across these territories, through these experiments that we honour him.

Mr. Vice-Chancellor, in the name of the Council, I present to you for admission to the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa, Declan Donnellan.

Carol Chillington Rutter, MA PhD