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Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Fiona Shaw: Playing Electra in Derry helped me see the power of tragedy

The recent death of my brother and the cycle of violence in Northern Ireland made performing Electra on tour an extraordinary experience

By the late 1980s I had played a series of heroines at the RSC witty women on the brink of marriage, such as Portia, Beatrice and Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew. I associated acting with entertainment, with being able to turn a line on a sixpence and make people laugh. So when I was asked to do Electra I felt quite ambivalent. But I thought it would be a change. I'd just done Mary Stuart in Greenwich and had begun to see the power of tragedy.

Electra was very hard to rehearse. My brother had recently died in a car crash and this was the first production where I had experienced, to an extent, some of the high emotions described in the play. I felt more exposed than I had in comedy. If you're untrue in a Greek tragedy, it just doesn't deliver at all. You have to wait until it strikes a chord deep in the performers' hearts.

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READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.theguardian.com