Fiona Shaw

State of the Art

by Peg Aloi

She has wowed audiences on both sides of the Atlantic with title roles in Hedda Gabler, Electra, and a gender-erasing Richard II and in her one-woman show The Wasteland. But it's from her films that most Americans will know Fiona Shaw: the sympathetic teacher in My Left Foot; a sturdy captain's wife in PBS's Persuasion; a hip mentor with a taste for boys in London Kills Me; the ill-fated meddling neighbor in The Butcher Boy.

It was while working on The Butcher Boy that Shaw became involved with The Last September. "We were staying in a country house in Ireland, and one night Neil Jordan mentioned the screenplay [by John Banville, adapted from Elizabeth Bowen's novel]. He asked me about directors for it, because he had done Michael Collins and felt that he had dealt with that story from the point of view that interested him. This is really the other side of it, the enemy. It is the type of film where one can revisit that time from the baddies' point of view."

The baddies being the Anglo-Irish aristocrats, whose centuries-old entitlement and unspoken sovereignty slowly crumbled when turn-of-the-century Irish rebels descended upon tony estates like the one depicted in Bowen's novel. Bowen grew up on such an estate, and it shows in her pre-Raphaelite-like descriptions and emotionally riven characters, quiet pathologies often only hinted at. Shaw's Marda Norton is a vampish sophisticate who makes a career out of failed engagements and leisurely weekends in the country, and who becomes confidante and mentor to the story's romantic ingenue, Lois (The Avengers' Keeley Hawes). "Marda is the sort of visiting clown. She hovers between knowing things and being unable to do anything worthwhile for herself."

It turns out that, like me, Shaw is a Bowen fan. "I was also brought up in County Cork, so I feel a connection. She's sort of our version of Virginia Woolf, and she's also similar to Henry James, she has the same long convoluted sentences full of ambiguousness and ambivalence and contradiction." Shaw read her as an adolescent, "though she wasn't in any way part of our curriculum. I think she was perceived as being too English, but in fact, she named and mapped the countryside phenomenally well. She writes about North Cork with the sense that it is a place full of lakes, which it isn't, and she captures the quality of light like a sort of watercolor. She has what later became Muriel Spark's gift of making the ordinary sinister, or making the sinister ordinary. In The Last September, you get hints of that, with the soldiers rolling in."

And Shaw feels that the film's director, Deborah Warner (with whom she has collaborated for more than 10 years), has done a masterful job of bringing Bowen to the screen: "I think Deborah has been incredibly true to not just the book but to the intention of the book and the texture of the book. And Slawomir [Idziak, the director of photography, who worked on Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy] has done the same. The fact that he is Polish somehow in a strange way deconstructs it, his Polish eye on the Irish landscape and that strange gleam he applies. It is so not how people think of Ireland, and yet it is more poetically Irish than it is really Irish, which is what the book is."

With her brown-black eyes and aquiline nose and her voice, rich in mossy, musical depth, Shaw comes from that poetical Celtic bloodline. Many have compared her to Vanessa Redgrave, but she is earthier, less ethereal. Playing Marda, she has occasion to comment on the nature of Irishness itself, at one point telling an English soldier: "We Anglo-Irish are less a people than a tribe." Shaw says, "I think Marda names something useful for all of us, which is that journalists are a tribe, and actors are a tribe, because we are all actually from enormous tribes, we all share something which is this way of life, a tribal attitude, a group attitude of mind, you could sort of say it's a religious order, isn't it?"

The Last September opens next Friday, April 28, at the Kendall Square.