Hello on this nearly sunny day.. ready for the questions about Mary and other matters religious ...or NOT

Fiona

In regards to young actors do you advise training at drama school? And! what is the best piece of acting advice you've ever been given? Trying not to flood you with all kinds of embarrassing compliments but you are wonderful. x

Yes, I advise training, you can turn from a stooped library smelling tweed-skirt wearing philosophy undergraduate into the hawkish swan that I was at 21. And the best piece of advice I've been given is "think on the line" - which means don't analyse but allow what you're saying to completely be of you and from you. And little lightbulbs will go off in your mind.

It was something of a surprise to see you in Trueblood. What made you step out in that direction, and did you enjoy the experience?

I loved Trueblood. Especially as I was rung up in my dressing room and just asked: would I like to spend six months in Hollywood. The writers are some of the best in the world. And so it was a great privilege to spend the time fighting vampires and driving home at dawn next to the Pacific ocean, doolally with tiredness.

I had a wonderful time, staying in Bel Air, the sounds of the grass being cut like a princess's fringe every morning, the whirr of the sprinklers, the sound of expensiveness is that.

This has been bugging me since I saw it but, what is being repeated inside the perspex box during the audience interaction at the the beginning of 'The Testament of Mary'?

What you hear are prayers. I know that one of them is "Hail Holy Queen, mother of mercy. Hail our life, our sweetness and our hope ...". And of course, outside the box, you are hearing the sounds of hell.

What has been your most challenging first entrance? I remain in awe of your Lady Spanker's hilarious first entrance in London Assurance at the National - was it exhausting?

Lady Gay was quite hard because I had to laugh so I would practice like mad laughing behind the scenes, trying to make myself hysterical so I could surf on her laughter as I entered. My entrance in Mother Courage was hard because I had to sing coming up from the ground with the band playing underneath me. I could barely hear them with the explosions but it felt very exciting. But my most difficult entrance was as Medea where I had to walk calmly behind the glass and very gently say "Good afternoon, Ladies" when I had just been a screaming banshee in the basement. I always felt that the essence of the evening depended on how well I did that first line.

I noticed during The Testament of Mary you interacted with a few objects on stage that were not directly related to the performance (the pot of honey for example)- was this a technique for emotional recall? If so is generally the way you approach a role, via personalisation and substitution?

In fact all of the objects in The Testament of Mary are connected to the new testament. I used to have milk with the honey but I gave that up. You will notice that the objects tend to be domestic but their significance is that they are in reply to many Renaissance paintings where you see these items and the use of them during the evening slowly builds up the famous banality of torture and ordinariness. We use coins, dice, water, cloth, a ladder, a sponge, and Jerusalem artichokes as a pun.

I saw you alongside Alan Rickman in 'John Gabriel Borkman' in the Abbey in Dublin. I was sitting at the very back row and at one point I literally felt your voice hit me with its power. I couldn't believe it.

Is this something that takes years of development or is it something in your technique and warm-up? Any quick vocal tips?

Thanks!

Voices change with age. But the pleasure of being an experiences actor is that you begin to associate speaking with thinking loudly. If you are concentrated, and your imagination is fully engaged with what you are saying, it is remarkable how quiet you can be, but how you know not only the listener's ear can hear it, but ideally their mind too. I've always been interested in the mutual hypnotism of acting. If the actor's hear is racing due to a thought, engaged members of the audience's hearts also race.

A vocal tip is to scoop your voice from high to low: it'll tell you whether you're on good form or not.

Hi! For a few months now I'd been thinking of performing richard ii with an all female cast and then weirdly, googled to to see if anybody had done it before (i wasn't expecting them to) and your production came up? What was it like as a woman to perform richard ii? I love reading the play it is my fave and I would just LOVE to play and direct a play like richard and I was curious as how you found it, interpreting a very kingly role in the male dominated world of Richard? I would really have loved to have seen you in it! I was gutted I couldn't find any DVDS!

Great minds think alike even if there's 15 years in the interim. There were many reasons for playing Richard II and, of course, we had a mainly male cast. But Richard is a highly poetical almost musical construction and therefore is spared the realism of more robust writing, which we thought allowed access. The play is pure poetry, entirely in verse, and so it holds a big idea very well.

You seem to be a fairly private person living an increasingly public life. Even though you seem to be quite at ease socially, are there times that you just have to shut the door on all that? You seem so busy and content with being so, but how do you close that all out and regenerate when you need to?

I sleep like a baby. I can sleep on trains, on the shoulder of a stranger, on an aeroplane. I also have a garden and fantastic friends.

How do you play such a horrible character (Aunt Petunia)
but when really your such a lovely person, do you have any tips for young actors?

I actually like Aunt Petunia a lot - she's a rather limited person and clearly the less glamorous sister. That's never a nice place to be in the family. But if you don't like Aunt Petunia you should look up Harry Melling, who played the horrible Dudley Dursley - Harry in real life is a tall lissome handsome beautiful young man. So don't believe all you see.

What do you read for pleasure?

I read poems in bed and novels on holiday and anything that's suggested to me by my literary friends.

Hello. I believe you're a fairly regular runner. What do you enjoy about it and to what extent does it help you in your creative process.

Also, I'm curious. In the Barbican production of Testament of Mary on occasion you use a northern Irish accent. Did you do the same in New York?

Thanks

I'm mainly cycling now. It's especially lovely at night.

As for my northern accent, I did use it in New York for the voice of the evangelist but in my mind was an actor called Stephen Kennedy who would have played this man had he appeared in the play.

Hi fiona I love your work you are an amazing actress , what's next for you after the testament of Mary ?

I'm going to the Athens festival to perform the Ancient Marriner.

And later this summer I'm remounting the Marriage of Figaro at ENO.

Hi, could you please tell us a little about the vulture you have on stage with you in this play - is it fun having it there? And what is your favourite animal?

I like the vulture very much he's very patient with me. And as he only eats dead things, I'm safe once I keep breathing.

Fiona,
You played so many different women.
Can you say what's your favourite role up till now?
And is 'the stage' your favourite place?
It seems to me your roles are very often enormously emotional
and "heavy".
You are so full off passion and your enthusiasm is there every time.
I want to thank you,I think you are amazing.
(excuse my grammatical errors)

I would say what I try to do is to keep the heaviness out, and play everyone however extreme the story as someone you might know. Our connection to tragedy for me is through the humour that everyone uses in life to protect themselves from the growling tiger outside.

Have you ever thought of doing some sort of sideline in lecturing/after-dinner speaking? You are an incredible performer, but also *such* a talented, fascinating and inspirational speaker. Things like NT platforms are lovely, but obviously only come around when there’s a play on. The APAP talk you gave in New York was wonderful. Or more documentaries/presenting! The British Face was fabulous.

x

I like giving talks very much - so I wait for the next gauntlet.

Hi Fiona,
What's your favourite city which you've performed in over the years? I think it's great that more and more and more actors are taking their productions away from the usual London and Broadway.

I've loved playing around the world: Australia, Canada, France, Spain. But without doubt the most astonishing place to play was Epidauros in Greece where 12,000 people sat in one evening and a bird sang in my ear.

Why not more film?

Ask the filmmakers. I love doing films. I especially have enjoyed the great film makers like Terry Mallick, Brian De Palma, and Bob Raffelson. I think I have had a very good time in film and will continue to once I've finished this Testament.

Saw your Riders to the Sea, Elegy For Young Lovers & Figaro (missed your much praised Rape of Lucretia). What's next for you in opera? You once mentioned Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites? Thanks and brava on Testament of Mary, a truly extraordinary piece of theatre.

I'm thrilled to say that the Rape of Lucretia has been invited to the Deutsche Opera in Berlin in November. And it will play again the following summer at Glyndebourne. I was very proud of my team on this. Meanwhile I'm planning various ones.

I like opera because it's like wrangling with a giant beast all of whose tentacles are huge talents so everyone you look – the singers, the orchestra, the design – you are being asked to hold and make sense of those elements and in the end, like all great theatre, it is the size of the emotional truth at the centre of it that's being released. I feel very small like the Wizard of Oz, not least at the Metropolitan Opera last year, with a chorus of 90 and everyone singing and speaking Russian.

Fiona - what's happened to your Cork accent?

It's still there... and after 35 years of living in London even I'm amazed.

Hi Fiona - what made you on first reading decide to do Testament of Mary?

I knew it was a stunner. I found it frightening and that excited me.

What was the most underrated film/ play that no-one saw, that you want to tell everyone about?

I think Machinal, directed by Stephen Daldry, had much more life in it by the time it was discovered. It had to come off at the National Theatre and there was no theatre big enough to welcome it's phenomenal mechanical set. It was a story of a tiny person who was inarticulate being overwhelmed by city life and the selfish immorality of her boss and the law.

I remember that you said once that you use physical pain in your acting. Exactly how does that work for you? What feelings does that give you? And do you feel that you can use any of your acting skills to ease both physical and emotional pain? You are by far the most talented actress I have ever seen, by the way, truly amazing :)

In life, I'm the most unpainseeking person. I have no neurotic interest in pain. But all dancers stretch daily in order to realign their thought and their feeling. So after lazy bouts of my not doing anything like that, I find that during the rehearsal for a play and the immediate preparation beforehand, stretching and speaking helps. The lines that are to do with the extreme emotion focus themselves rather immediately and it feels truer than inventing narratives.

Hello Fiona! Are you spiritual at all? And what is your favourite quote or motto to follow? P.S I'm coming to Testament of Mary Thursday evening! Best Wishes x

I suppose we are all spiritual: the moment you acknowledge it, a world inside your mind, and access it, you are in the territory of something other than the physical world. The metaphysical world is where you play with notions of god and it's very hard to undo that world if you've been brought up with from childhood. The world of morality is connected to this area and none of us are free from that.

Forgive me if I go now I have to have lunch with my mother who is seeing the show tonight .. and then get to the theatre
Thank you all for these illuminating questions . Some are best left unanswered as they might ground the experience for others!
Best
Fiona Shaw