Theatre - David Jays on an actress who has conquered the hardest roles
Whether or not Fiona Shaw is well received in the title role of Medea, about to open in London, her performance will surely be mesmerising. Shaw creates figures who stick in the mind, provoking keen and prickly discussion. From the myth of the mother who kills her own children, Euripides mined a character who, in her alienation and resolve, still seems striking. When Deborah Warner's production opened at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin last year, Shaw was praised for conveying not only tragedy, but humour, even warmth. "This is the first Medea I've ever seen that I've wanted to cradle in my arms," wrote Lyn Gardner in the Guardian. This response suggests something of Shaw's unique quality.
Greek tragedy's embrace of the unendurable can seem elusive in contemporary production, but it sharpened the edge of Electra, Shaw's first collaboration with Warner (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1988). This gaunt figure was a long streak of suffering, bare arms and feet protruding from a ragged black dress, beating her breast with such unremitting fervour that you winced and thought about bruises rather than rhetoric. Compared to the people keeping their voices low and shuffling around the edge of the stage, this Electra was terrifyingly uncompromising.
Shaw and Warner have since collaborated on a range of projects in an unparalleled partnership in contemporary theatre, where directors cling to interpretative priority. Usually working with the designer Hildegard Bechtler, they have produced The Good Person of Sichuan and Richard II at the National Theatre; Hedda Gabler in London and Dublin (one of Shaw's few appearances in her native Ireland); a production of Footfalls that was condemned by the Samuel Beckett estate; and a startling version of The Waste Land that toured unconventional venues throughout Europe and North America, finding in T S Eliot a modernist desolation cut by vaudevillian ventriloquism.
Although Shaw has won several major awards, people who don't enjoy her acting really don't enjoy it. Praise for her Richard II jostled with vituperative dismissal: "a hopeless flibbertigibbet", "maddening", "a giggling prat". More recently at the National, her performance as Miss Jean Brodie and her production of Widowers' Houses received some exasperated pummelling. What do people object to? For some, it might be the self-deprecation of her performances; for others, a windy insistence they find self- indulgent. For her admirers, Shaw's intelligence gives unsparing physical life to characters struggling between strength and vulnerability.
The 1995 production of Richard II provides the strongest example of divided reaction, if only because its first audacious move was casting Shaw in the title role. Given that the performance history of Shakespeare's play worries at notions of masculinity, casting a woman in the role paradoxically allowed the focus to move away from effeminacy: martial machismo was never an option. Richard is transfixed between states, imprisoned in the Elizabethan notion of "the king's two bodies" - the monarchical body, passing from king to king, and flawed humanity. A king since childhood, Shaw's monarch had never quite grown up - even his feet dangled from the throne - and his caprice, cruelty and torment were unrelenting. In this mournful world of candle-smoked ritual, Shaw created an extraordinary monster, tugged by competing identities.
Although one of her vocal hallmarks is quavering indeterminacy, she is equally noted for piercing interpretation. "I have a tendency as an actress to come on and make a strong statement so the audience know who I am and then get on with it," Shaw has said. Her silent entrances are always startling, indicating the world of the play and, frequently, the character's estrangement from it. Her fearsomely unhappy Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew was first seen with scissors in hand, hacking into the walls and, self-mutilatingly, at her own hair. Miss Jean Brodie was presented to the audience in a flamboyantly blasphemous tableau modelled on Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, a dubious saviour awaiting betrayal. At night, Hedda Gabler prowled the marital home she never wanted, sickened by intimations of pregnancy, of a life confined and decided.
Having come to attention in The Rivals at the National Theatre in 1983, Shaw's initial reputation was for comedy, and she was frequently compared to Maggie Smith as a mistress of dither. In Hyde Park (RSC, 1987), a Carolean comedy by James Shirley updated to the Bloomsbury era, Shaw's endlessly evasive heroine emerged as a proto-Woolf, fending off suitors with her typewriter and stuffed monkey. She subsequently skirted this line of roles; but, several years later, she played the queen of non-committal wit, Millament in William Congreve's The Way of the World. This was evasion with a moral purpose, however. Millament feints around her beau until the very last moment, and the scene where the couple come to an accommodation took place not in one of the high-fashion salons of Phyllida Lloyd's production, but in Millament's attic room, a sanctuary from predatory banter. Who would not be reluctant to relinquish a room of one's own for the uncertain happiness of marriage, in a play riddled with infidelity and trust-fund chicanery? Shaw's melancholy uncertainty was a refuge that made perfect sense.
If the images Shaw finds for characters are impressive, she often features in equally innovative productions. She is buoyed by designs that might overwhelm other performers, most memorably in Stephen Daldry's fearsome production of Machinal (National, 1993). Sophie Treadwell's neglected 1928 expressionist drama of a young woman, condemned to death for murdering her overbearing husband, depicts the metropolis as a monstrous machine, and Ian MacNeil's set was a nightmare of metal and noise. Shaw's nervous presence, a bendy anxiety buffeted by a world of hard edges, defined a consciousness grappling for expression.
The same extremity informed Shaw's directorial debut at the National Theatre last year, with an undervalued production of George Bernard Shaw's first play, Widowers' Houses. Although accused of straining for effect, Fiona Shaw bravely tackled the irksome frivolity of her namesake's chatter. Set in a disconsolate glasshouse with echoes of Louise Bourgeois's dysfunctional chambers, Shaw shoved the bad sex and sullen violence of GBS's scenario into view, tightly binding the dual hypocrisies of domestic and commercial activity. Another directorial endeavour was her urgent recording of Macbeth for Naxos. She also played Lady Macbeth, in a remorseless performance that culminates in a sleepwalking scene of shredded consciousness, panting and scrubbing at guilt-stained hands. The air is rent with strange screams of death, and sound-effects conjure an audio movie: Lady Macbeth thudding through resolute soliloquy on horseback, while the banquet is played amid dinner-party twitter and the nervous chink of cutlery. Water is a baleful presence, and comes to represent the terrible failure of the Macbeths to erase their deeds. Both productions suggest that Shaw will continue to be a challenging director, once Medea's torments are done.
Medea opens on 30 January at the Queens Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1 (020 7494 5040)
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