So there really are two Fiona Shaws. One is the superb classical actress who over the last decade has given acclaimed performances in Sophocles “Electra,” Brecht’s “The Good Person of Sichuan,” Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” and many Shakespearean plays, winning three Olivier Awards (England’s Tonys) in the process. The other Shaw is the daredevil who’s calmly stated that “I want to change the face of the British theater.” Actually, you can throw in a third Shaw, the one who’s appeared in an oddball array of movies including “My Left Foot,” “Mountains of the Moon,” “Three Men and a Little Lady,” “Persuasion” and “Super Mario Brothers” (during which she organized Shakespeare readings for the cast at her rented beach house).
Shaw’s Richard has created violent critical disagreement. Con: “gimmick casting,” “ghastly travesty,” “not enough maleness to play Peter Pan.” Pro: “intensity, audacity, imagination, eloquence, wit,” “one of the most thrilling Shakespeares I can remember.” Shaw’s Richard is a gripping study in self-delusion, a king who’s been seduced by the medieval idea of divine right, and who learns that he is flawed and mortal. Shaw dares to show Richard having fun as king: he gallivants off to war, crying in a mock accent, “We will make for Oireland presently,” and adding a few"oink-oinks" to indicate how he feels about the Irish upstarts. But this wise-guy young ruler rises to true tragic height: imprisoned, Shaw brings a special force to the lines “My brain will prove the female to my soul,/My soul the father. . .”
“It’s not a feminist or feminine gesture,” says Shaw. “I play Richard not from my gender center but from my imaginative center. Different aspects of Shakespeare will be revealed in each new generation. We are the gender generation.” The fury of the opposition has taken her aback. “There is an enormous taboo about women playing male roles. I underestimated it. Wow! I thought the world was more advanced.” One critic fumed that no king would behave like Shaw’s Richard. “Have one look at the royal family now,” replies Shaw.
Speaking in her lilting County Cork accent in a London cafe, Shaw at 36 throws off ideas like the philosophy major she was at the University of Cork. The daughter of an eye-surgeon father and a physicist mother,she has two brothers; another, the youngest, was killed in a car crash, which fueled the grief she displayed in her shattering 1988 performance in “Electra.” This was the start of her collaboration with Warner, the leader of a new generation of British woman directors, a pairing that’s made them known as “the Terrible Twins.”
Shaw’s shock tactics are legendary. As Katharina in “The Taming of the Shrew,” she entered wielding a pair of scissors with which she gouged graffiti into the walls and chopped off chunks of her hair. “I wanted to give the effect of a woman mutilating herself, like some women in prison do,” said Shaw. Just before Christmas she appeared on the BBC performing T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem “The Waste Land.” It was a virtuoso feat as she switched personas with lightning speed, orchestrating Eliot’s symphony of allusion, rising to a climax of anguish that made the modernist classic a perfect statement for the fractures of the century’s end.
“We’ve been invited to do it in Sarajevo,” she says, adding that she’d love to bring it to New York. (Dream on, Fiona.) “In a new century, the theater can be a place of fabulous exploration into the imagination,” she says. “Theater has to change its form every time it’s done. You can use elements of the old form, but it takes one stroke to change it utterly. That’s me.” Blue-green eyes flashing, she laughs. No boast, it sounds like a challenge and a promise.
