Daughter On The Stage

Many actors would regard performing on the Abbey stage as something they aspire towards. But not Fiona McGeown who says that her role as Marie in the Abbey s current, critically-acclaimed production of Brian Friel s Translations phased her because: I never played before such a big audience before. And before this Fiona, best known as a full-time member of Blue Raincoat Theatre Company, took part in such productions as Hamlet, A Midsummer s Night s Dream, The Tempest and, more recently, Alice s Adventure s In Wonderland and Alice Through The Looking Glass, at the Peacock. This is her first role at the Abbey.

Playing at the Abbey was a challenge for me because I d never done it before and I loved the idea of playing Marie anywhere so doing it on the Abbey stage was a delight but it s really playing in front of an audience as big as the Abbey s that really clinched it for me she proffers.
That said, Fiona admits that acting in a production directed by the Artistic Director of the Abbey, Ben Barnes, turned out to be a challenge in that this work is very different from what I ve done before. Meaning that Blue Raincoat s approach to theatre is very physical and all to do with the body whereas with Friel it s just the word and every word counts.
Even so, anyone who s seen this production of Translations will notice that Fiona does bring a relatively powerful physicality to the play.
I m glad you think so she responds. But I m not doing that consciously, I m just letting my body do what it does. And Ben was very aware of where I was coming from, in this sense. I would do simple things like the way I sit on a chair and he d say that is a little bit dancer-ish! Yet I can t help doing this because that s how I was trained, I just had to learn to manipulate that tendency differently. Ben helped do that.
Translations is set in 1833 and deals, in part, with the peculiarly Irish phenomenon of Hedge Schools which grew out of the suppression of all legitimate means of Catholic education under the Penal Code of William III according to the Abbey programme. Fiona McGeown is 28-years old, born and raised a Catholic in Northern Ireland so clearly she can relate to the theme of the play.
People laugh a lot at this play and that surprised me because I think it is a really dark work she explains. Especially the deterioration of everything at the end, which goes down into nothing. I d love it to be darker. Because the play does describe something that is true. And continuing. I was brought up a Catholic in Portadown, which is the black hole of the North so I can relate to, say, Doalty and Owen going off to meet the Donnelly twins which is basically a metaphor for meeting the Provos but I was an observer rather than a participant in terms of the Catholic/Protestant divide. Yet I can recognise echoes of family life around me. But I also feel that although Translations is set in Donegal in 1833 and has echoes of what s still going on, the story also is totally universal and could apply to anywhere there is that kind of political tension.
In the play Fiona plays an Irish peasant who falls in love with a British soldier, and forsakes her Irish lover, with tragic results. Would she, herself, sacrifice it all for a tall, dark, handsome stranger!
No she says, pausing to perfection. I would have had the tall, dark, handsome stranger, to begin with! Her joking joyfulness is tainted somewhat, however, by one reviewer who claimed that although the acting in this production of Translations is the finest acting seen on the Abbey stage for a long time the exception is, eh, Fiona. Happily, not all critics agreed with this point-of-view. But what is Fiona McGeown s gut-response when she reads something like that?
Normally I don t give a shit about reviews but I really feel that person was unfair to me when she said I was quite tough. For me it was extremely important to bring out the toughness in Marie so I think that person misinterpreted my performance she says.
Not only that, the night after the review appeared in The Sunday Independent, Fiona went out on the Abbey stage and deliberately made myself tougher she insists, adding that she is very happy with her performance as Marie. So, too, are the rest of the cast and director, Ben Barnes. But as to what will follow this, Fiona hasn t a clue. That, she knows damn well, is the nature of this particular beast.
There s nothing definite, so I can t really say. But after seven years acting, I am getting used to that now!