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MOTHER MARY COMES TO HER
Spotlight
Her gaze is vivid, agile, alert, quizzical. In her frame there is a coiled and unpredictable energy. At 54, the Irish-born actress Fiona Shaw is most widely known as Petunia Dursley, in the Harry Potter movies, but in 2001 she was made an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her remarkable stage work. She was last on Broadway in 2003, playing Euripides's Medea, and before that in a solo performance of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, directed in both instances by Deborah Warner, her frequent collaborator. When Shaw evokes darkness or determination or deep-seated pain, as she has done in many of the roles she has played—Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Brecht's Mother Courage, Beckett's Winnie in Happy Days—she manages to suggest a fearless grandeur as well as a jerky, neurotic, and fierce inner life. Her performances are memorable because of the pull between her magnificent presence and her ability to use irony and offer sharp, serious interpretation. Over the past six months, as she and I worked with Warner on The Testament of Mary—which I wrote as a stage monologue for the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2011, then turned into a novella, and later revised for the one-woman New York production with Shaw—I was aware of her forensic examination of the text, her close reading of every sentence. At the same time, she was seeking a convincing way to physically inhabit the part of the mother of Jesus. She let nothing come easily or lazily, and it was out of her unwillingness to settle for simple, unambiguous emotion that a performance filled with dark danger and utter sensuous surprise emerged. The Testament of Mary premieres on Broadway this month.
COLM TÓIBÍN
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