By RICHARD COVINGTON
PARIS -- Irish-born actress Fiona Shaw is one of the most thoughtful, controversial and exhilarating performers in Britain today, widely heralded (to her dismay) as "the next Vanessa Redgrave." With her constant collaborator, director Deborah Warner (the two women have earned the nickname "The Terrible Twins"), she has most recently ignited venomous criticism and equally rapturous praise by playing Richard II, the sorrowful English king deposed by his childhood friend and cousin Henry Bolingbroke and later murdered. Shaw
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was frankly consternated by the resulting outcry in the British press over casting a woman as the king. To her and to Warner, casting across gender was a risky stroke of inspiration intended to add a new dimension to the homosexual undertones between Richard and Bolingbroke.
Wickedly ironic, voluble and intense offstage, the 36-year-old former philosophy student is wholly unpredictable onstage, routinely skating on the edge of a theatrical cliff. In "The Taming of the Shrew," she wielded a pair of scissors like an incendiary assassin, chopping off chunks of her own hair. As "Electra," she became a woman possessed, tearing across the stage on the verge of madness.
A fixture with the Royal Shakespeare Company and London's National Theatre, Shaw has won three Olivier awards (equivalent to Broadway's Tony Awards) for best actress. Her BBC film of "The Waste Land," a dramatic rendition of the T.S. Eliot epic poem directed by Warner, was a tour de force, with the actress conjuring up a bleak gallery of characters lost in a realm of spiritual blight.
All is not doom, gloom and self-seriousness, however, in a film career that has cast Shaw in "Three Men and a Little Lady," and in the eminently forgettable movie of the video game "Super Mario Brothers." She has also appeared in "My Left Foot," "Jane Eyre" and the underappreciated "Mountains of the Moon," in which she portrayed the free-spirited wife of the great 19th-century English explorer Sir Richard Burton.
We sat down recently with Shaw at her Bastille-area hotel in Paris, where she was finishing a run of "Richard II." As we soon discovered, wind up the actress on subjects metaphysical, moral and psychological and the results will make your head spin.
How did you first come up with the idea to play "Richard II?"
It first came up when I was playing "Electra" and someone suggested I do "Hamlet." I had no wish to do "Hamlet" because the gender is crucial to the nature of that play in a way that it is not in "Richard II." King Richard is not really a man, he is a god.