Shaw Delight

Actor and director Fiona Shaw talks to Sarah Lambie about workshopping opera, roles she relates to, and causes close to her heart

When I call Fiona Shaw she’s on her way home from RADA. She’s just borrowed a group of students to help her decide how she’s going to direct Cendrillon for Glyndebourne on Tour which begins rehearsals in September. She’s infectiously excited about what her morning’s exploration has done for her understanding of the piece: “Suddenly these characters begin to emerge not as cardboard cut-outs but as people with real psychological problems, and somehow instead of being a children’s story it becomes something about the ill-ease of what it is to be in the world.”

Is improvising with actors in this way her usual approach with opera, I ask: “Yes, I did it with Lucretia and it worked incredibly well” (Shaw directed Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia for Glyndebourne on Tour in 2013, and it subsequently re-ran at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin and at Glyndebourne Festival). “One thing I did with the RADA students for that was the rape scene, because I didn’t want the singers to be embarrassed by it, so I needed to find ways of doing it that could at least be rehearsed – I like to have a possibility limitation so I’m not asking absolutely everything of them.”

Workshopping with actors isn’t common practice among opera directors, but Shaw finds it a really helpful process: “I think it’s because I’m from the theatre. And I also don’t ever want to decide on a reality, I always want to discover that reality.”

Part of this discovery, she goes on to explain, comes in respecting and trusting the composer: “When I did Elegy for Young Lovers at the ENO I thought God I don’t know what this is about, but I went to Italy and met Hans Werner Henze – on a Ryanair flight just for the day – and he was so delightful and so old, and I thought, in this opera must be him and sure enough, then I had a ball finding the opera, because I believed that all the fears of his childhood were somewhere in what seemed this cartoonish reality, and quickly it stopped being cartoonish and became quite frightening.”

Preliminary work on Cendrillon is only one of the plates Shaw is spinning at the moment, though. She’s got a number of projects on the go as an actor: filming in Belfast for Ruth Wilson’s new television series Mrs Wilson; and starting on a second series of Killing Eve by Phoebe Waller- Bridge, whom Shaw describes as “a genius of language – sort of a Dorothy Parker of the modern age.”

While we’re on her acting career, I ask Shaw something which arises from my own experience. Often in finding a character one is influenced by life – because naturally one brings one’s own truth to a role – but occasionally, roles influence life themselves, and in the discovery of a character written by a playwright or screenwriter one thinks I’d love to be more like that person. So has she ever played somebody whom she would like to be more like, herself?

“Well,” she says, much to my delight, “I think that’s one of the most beautiful things a person can say – that’s a really good use of art – you’ve made me love all the characters I’ve played in one go!”

“I played Celia [in Shakespeare’s As You Like It] when I was younger, at the RSC, and I loved her because she was witty and a little bit frightened about committing in life, and I was exactly the same! I really liked her because she did such good things for her friend Rosalind, and then I played Rosalind and I thought I am Rosalind – of course I wasn’t, but I thought this person has a heart the size of Scotland and has a gorgeous way of pursuing knowledge by just asking questions and I thought I would love to be that more.

“Growing up in Ireland, loving literature, loving Irish poetry, the parameters of my imagination were the parameters of the poets, and then I came to England and walked into the imagination of Arden and Shakespeare and it was really mind-expanding. I played Beatrice in Much Ado, who I also liked very much, she’s a very nice person, and I did the Taming of the Shrew which I didn’t like so much because I think Katharine is a very squashed person – but the very fact that you’re allowed to walk with these women who are trying to find something out about the nature of what it is to be human, not just what it is to be a woman, was a phenomenal privilege.

“I loved Hedda Gabler because she was flawed, I loved the fact that she was so honest about how she could not get comfortable in the world; and I loved Medea because she was very witty. I certainly felt I expanded when I played those women. I loved them, and did of course hope that some of them would rub off on myself.”

Despite the depth and variety of her Olivier award-winning career in the theatre, however, in recent years Shaw’s work has turned more to TV: “I haven’t done a play for four years now, I’ve gone in to television which has become the new theatre. I shouldn’t say that really because it’s not fair on the theatre, but television writing and acting has become superlative.

Christine Rice & Matthew Rose in Fiona’s The Rape of Lucretia at Glyndebourne © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Robbie Jack

“Theatre was at its best between the mid-80s and maybe the end of the nineties, it was still a place where something was being communally discussed. There was an idea that our generation was testing by throwing a big classic against a wall and seeing what would happen, and I do not feel at the moment that that is the enterprise. We’re not waiting with bated breath for the next Chekhov because we know that it will be radically rediscovered, so I don’t feel so excited about what’s going on in theatre, and it hasn’t a hope against television which is just phenomenally good. The TV series has absolutely whipped our audience away from the theatre – you know, why go out when you can stay in and watch stupendously well-argued, well thought-through, quite long stories?”

Knowing that Shaw is about to host a gala for SWAP’ra – a new charity supporting women and parents in opera – I ask whether there are other causes which she’s particularly behind at the moment, and not surprisingly for a woman with so evidently large a heart, a plethora of thoughts come out, including the need for vastly greater racial diversity in theatre and particularly in opera: “It is breath-taking that we remain racially so un-diverse in the opera: it’s not good for the opera, it’s not good for society, it’s not good for audiences”. She goes on, “I also wish that feminism would find its intellectual arm, rather than reactive feminism, you know I’m so sorry that Susan Sontag [American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist] is dead, she would write very well about this moment, and it needs a voice of some really huge intellectual force that takes on the inevitable complications of the contradictions.

“The #MeToo movement is fantastic, but will become a fundamentalist, parochial movement if it doesn’t find a serious intellectual voice or voices to hold its potential. And we should broaden our horizons beyond Brexit to worry about the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, these are also people – and they are people who are very near us on the TV, and they are also women, and they have been cruelly, cruelly treated. Rather than worry about Hollywood, perhaps we should worry about them.”

Sarah Lambie is an actress, singer, teacher, editor and writer. She is editor of Teaching Drama, Head of Content for drama at the Music & Drama Education Expo, and cofounder of Golem Theatre