It’s mind- travel isn’t it? She says this with charming self-parody
It’s mind- travel, isn’t it?” She says this with charming self-parody.The culture of performing was an integral part of Shaw’s middle-class Cork childhood. There is an astonishing alchemy between one’s imagination and the text. Sometimes the play takes you up an alleyway you’d never have thought. It’s quite hard to know there’s something you’re not getting and you must try and get it, and your roots to it are not private humiliations because there are people observing the endless culs-de-sac that you pursue totally and rigorously and then daftly have to relinquish.
It matters to me that my father perceives I’m working hard because the theatre is the last great circus and there’s a sense of running away to join it. This morning I was running in dappled sunlight down the canal at Primrose Hill, and there was nobody there because everyone was at work. Of course it’s a most privileged way of life – and it’s sometimes good to notice that because the activity itself is not pleasant, it’s terribly exposing and you meet yourself very quickly.. we’re heading straight now for Pseuds’ Corner. “In Ireland to work Sundays seemed always to be the most lofty duty anyone could perform I often work Sundays and late into the night. But beneath the jolly-hockey- sticks bounciness is a drive and intensity common among professional women who live alone, rejecting the comforts and confinements of domesticity in order to dedicate themselves to their work.She is talking about working hard, something she learnt to admire from the example of her father, a Cork eye-surgeon who was on call on Sundays. Her hair-cut – a closely-cropped skull-cap – is vaguely androgynous, but her frequent warm gusts of giggles have a hearty girlishness and, as if to prove she’s every inch a woman, she pulls up her rather ragged T-shirt to show me how much flab she is determined to run off. Why paint the painting that’s already been painted? Paint the one you don’t know There’s no harm done.
Next year you can put somebody nice in it and have the play back again if you need to.”The cast persist in calling the King “she”, a semantic blip that delights her, but then there’s nothing remotely male about her. And she continues: “What is the nature of the theatre? To create totalities that people can look at, accept, reject, be changed by. That’s a terribly good jolt for our accepting minds.” Shaw says thiswith the questioning cleverness of a mind sharpened by a philosophy degree (“a perfect way for helping someone as scatty as me focus on text”). The theatre’s role is to show things by reflection not by direct representation. I believe that you could do a production where you get down to the naked woman but people will still see a king because that’s what they believe they see. “If you wanted to be political you’d chose a play like Genet’s The Maids.
In this play sexuality isn’t really a problem so we’re not going to lose any part of it. Quite simply there’s no one else I would want for Richard II. And Fiona must be given these challenges – otherwise it’s a waste.”Certainly at this stage in Shaw’s career, it is the only Shakespearian role that excites. “I’ve played Rosalind, the Shrew, Portia, Beatrice and the others – Viola – are included in them; I don’t think I’d be going anywhere new by heading in that direction,” says Shaw. “Macbeth might already be done in my Electra; Cleopatra I’d love to do in time I’ve no wish to do Hamlet. Hamlet is a play about a man and his mother.”The latent prompting of Richard II is that my femaleness is very near to the heart of the play, and the world of the play is very near the heart of the theatre. It’s funny, I’m asked this question about why a woman, but you might just as well ask why somebody who isn’t English is playing him, or what makes us in the 20th century think we can play people from other centuries.
