Deborah (Hebrew: דְבוֹרָה, Modern Dvora Tiberian Dəḇôrā ; "Bee", Arabic: دبورة Daborah‎) was a prophetess of the God of the Israelites, the fourth Judge of pre-monarchic Israel, counselor, warrior, and the wife of Lapidoth according to the Book of Judges chapters 4 and 5.

The only female judge mentioned in the Bible, Deborah led a successful counterattack against the forces of Jabin king of Canaan and his military commander Sisera, the narrative is recounted in chapter 4.

Judges chapter 5 gives the same story in poetic form. This passage, often called The Song of Deborah, may date to as early as the 12th century BC and is perhaps the earliest sample of Hebrew poetry. It is also significant because it is one of the oldest passages that portrays fighting women, the account being that of Jael, the wife of Heber, a Kenite tent maker. Jael killed Sisera by driving a tent peg through his temple as he slept. Both Deborah and Jael are portrayed as strong independent women. The poem may have been included in the Book of the Wars of the Lord mentioned in Numbers 21:14.

Deborah Warner CBE (born 12 May 1959) is a British director of theatre and opera known for her interpretations of the works of Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Büchner, and Henrik Ibsen, and for her long-term working relationship with the Irish actress Fiona Shaw.

Warner was born in Oxfordshire, England to antiquarians, Roger Harold Metford Warner and Ruth Ernestine Hurcombe. She studied theatre and stage management at drama school, and then in 1980 founded the KICK theatre company for young talented amateur actors when she was 21.

In 1987 Warner joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she would later direct Titus Andronicus. At the RSC she began her long-time collaboration with Fiona Shaw. The two women have collaborated on plays including Electra (RSC); The Good Person of Sezuan (1989, National Theatre); Hedda Gabler (1991, The Abbey Theatre and BBC2); the controversial Richard II, with Shaw in the title role, also at the National Theatre (1995) and televised by BBC2; Footfalls, whose radical staging so enraged the Beckett estate that the production was pulled during its run; The PowerBook, at the National Theatre, a dramatisation of Jeanette Winterson's novel; Medea (2000–2001, Queen's Theatre and Broadway); and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in which Shaw played the small part of Portia. The production starred Ralph Fiennes and Simon Russell Beale; first staged at the Barbican Centre, it later toured Europe. Shaw and Warner toured the world with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which began in Wilton's Music Hall in London's East End. Her work began to focus on the link of drama to places, a theme which was expanded upon in her Angel Project. In 2007, following negotiations with the Beckett estate, Warner directed Shaw in Happy Days at the National Theatre, followed in 2009 by Mother Courage and Her Children (with Shaw in the title role) at the same venue. She returned to the Barbican Centre in 2011 to direct The School for Scandal.

Ivo van Hove (born 1958) is a Belgian theater director best known as the artistic director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam in the Netherlands as well as for his avant garde experimental theater productions on Off-Broadway.

He began his career as a stage director in 1981, working with plays he had written himself (Ziektekiemen, Geruchten). He was artistic manager at AKT, Akt-Vertical and De Tijd, successively. Between 1990 and 2000 he was the director at Het Zuidelijk Toneel. Since 2001, Van Hove has been general director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam (the Amsterdam Theatre Group). He has coordinated productions at the Edinburgh International Festival, the Venice Biennale, the Holland Festival, Theater der Welt in Germany, the Wiener Festwochen in Vienna, as well as working in London, Canada, Lisbon, Paris, Verona, Hannover, Porto, Cairo, Poland and New York. He has directed companies from the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, the Staatstheater in Stuttgart and the New York Theatre Workshop. He produced Thuisfront for Dutch television and his first cinematic film, Amsterdam, came out in 2009. Ivo van Hove directed the musical Rent for Joop van den Ende. At the Vlaamse Opera, he staged a production of Lulu (Alban Berg) and the complete Ring Cycle by Wagner (2006–2008). He put on a production of Janáček’s De Zaak Makropoulos and Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta for the De Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam. From 1998 to 2004, Ivo van Hove was festival manager of the Holland Festival, where he presented an annual selection of international theatre, music, opera and dance. Since 1984, Van Hove has worked as part of the artistic management of the Department of Dramatic Art at Hogeschool Antwerpen.