HBO's "True Blood" Actress Fiona Shaw Directs Opera

Fiona Shaw easily morphs from
television witchery to a Da Ponte romp
with the greatest of ease.

It should come as no surprise that Irish actress Fiona Shaw, who plays Marnie Stonebrook on the HBO hit series True Blood, would have a connection to opera. Her character on the blood-thirsty drama is described as "...timid and socially awkward medium who serves as leader of a local Wiccan group. She poses a threat to humans and vampires alike." Sounds pretty operatic. But for a woman who has gained famed acting out the roles of Medea, Electra and Portia in Julius Caesar on the world's greatest stages, opera directing seems like a natural extension of her talents. She acted in many plays directed by Deborah Warner who entered the opera arena with works for Glyndebourne, English National Opera and a production of Dido & Aeneas with Les Arts Florissants that played in Vienna, Paris and Amsterdam. There is little doubt that it was Ms. Warner's influence that may have pushed Ms. Shaw toward an operatic directorial debut after a 24-year working relationship with each other. The production was Riders to the Sea, a one-act drama by Ralph Vaughan Willams, that took place at English National Opera in 2008. Since then she has reappeared at ENO to direct Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers in April 2010 and will return to the company in October 2011 to direct a production of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. Or perhaps it was Ms. Shaw's mother that exerted that most influence on her daughter's decisions. Before becoming a physicist she had another career in mind for herself: opera singer. [Source, Source, Source ]

Read a wonderful article written by Fiona Shaw in 2008 describing why she chose Riders to the Sea as her opera-directing debut by clicking here. Learn more about the actress by clicking here. A complete biography after the jump.

Listen to the complete Riders to the Sea:



VIDEO GUIDE: Listen to Fiona Shaw narrate a specially commissioned short film which gives an introduction to Glyndebourne Opera House; Watch the actress perform a prologue to Purcell's Dido & Aeneas filled with works by Hughes, Eliot and Yeats, at the Opéra Comique in 2009; An interview with Ms. Shaw describing her preparation for Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers; A preview to the upcoming production of Le Nozze di Figaro at ENO with commentary by Fiona Shaw.


BONUS CLIP: Fiona Shaw recorded a PSA, along with other cast members of True Blood, for the "It Gets Better" project:



Fiona Shaw, CBE (born Fiona Mary Wilson on 10 July 1958) is an Irish actress and theatre director. Although to international audiences she is probably most familiar for her minor role as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films, she is an accomplished classical actress. Shaw was awarded an honorary CBE in 2001. Shaw was born as Fiona Mary Wilson in County Cork, Ireland to a mixed-religious couple, and was raised Roman Catholic. Her father was an optic surgeon and her mother was a physicist. She attended secondary school at Scoil Mhuire in Cork City. She received her degree in University College Cork. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London and was part of 'new wave’ of actors to emerge from the Academy. She received much acclaim as Julia in the National Theatre production of Richard Sheridan's The Rivals (1983), a role which demonstrated her gift for comedy. Despite her natural comic abilities, Shaw has opted more often than not for roles showcasing her extreme but unaffected emotional intensity. These performances have earned her numerous stage awards. Her notable theatrical roles include Young Woman in Machinal, Celia in As You Like It (1984), Madame de Volanges in Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1985), Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew (1987), Winnie in Happy Days (2007), and the title roles in Electra (1988), The Good Person of Sechuan (1989), Hedda Gabler (1991), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1998) and Medea (2000). She performed T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land as a one-person show at the Liberty Theatre in New York to great acclaim in 1996, winning the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show for her performance. Shaw played the lead in Richard II, directed by Deborah Warner in 1995. Shaw has collaborated with Warner on a number of occasions, on both stage and screen. Shaw has also worked in film and television, including My Left Foot, Jane Eyre, Persuasion, Gormenghast, and five of the Harry Potter films in which she played Harry Potter's insufferable aunt Petunia Dursley. Shaw had a brief but key role in Brian DePalma's The Black Dahlia. In 2008, she directed her first opera, Riders to the Sea by Vaughan Williams at the ENO. In 2009, Shaw collaborated with Deborah Warner again, taking the lead role in Tony Kushner's translation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children. In a 2002 article for The Daily Telegraph, Rupert Christiansen described their professional relationship as "surely one of the most richly creative partnerships in theatrical history." Other collaborations between the two women include productions of Brecht's The Good Woman of Szechuan and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, the latter was adapted for television. Shaw appeared in The Waste Land at Wilton's Music Hall in January 2010 and in a National Theatre revival of London Assurance in March 2010. In November 2010, Shaw starred in Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin alongside Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan. Shaw has become a regular cast member of the TV Show True Blood. Shaw’s character, Marnie Stonebrook, has been described as an underachieving palm reader who is spiritually possessed by an actual witch. Her character leads a coven of necromancer witches who threaten the status quo in Bon Temps, erasing most of Eric Northman's memories and leaving him almost helpless when he tries to break up their coven. Shaw has been romantically linked in the press with actress Saffron Burrows. Neither actress has publicly commented on the relationship. The two appeared together in the National Theatre's production of The PowerBook, a play based on the novel of the same name by Jeanette Winterson in which they played lovers. In an interview with the New Statesman published on 24 September 2009, Shaw stated that she lives in Primrose Hill where she "has lived ... on and off for a long time". In a December 2009 interview, Shaw described herself as "very happily" single.

CREDITS:The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985) (TV series); The Taming Of The Shrew (RSC 1987); Electra (RSC 1988); My Left Foot (1989); Mountains of the Moon (1990); Three Men and a Little Lady (1990); Hedda Gabler (1993) (a televisation of the NT production); Super Mario Bros. (1993); Undercover Blues (1993); Persuasion (1995); Jane Eyre (1996); Anna Karenina (1997); The Butcher Boy (1997); The Avengers (1998); The Last September (1999); Gormenghast (2000) (TV); Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001); Medea (2001) (West End & NYC); The Seventh Stream (2001); Doctor Sleep (2002); The Triumph of Love (2002); Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002); The PowerBook (2002) (NT, which she co-devised); Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004); Midsummer Dream (2005); Empire (2005, international tour) (TV); The Black Dahlia (2006); Catch and Release (2007); Fracture (2007); Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007); Happy Days (2007 & 2008, NT and internationally); Dorian Gray (2009); Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 (2010); Noi Credevamo (2010); Mother Courage and her Children (NT); London Assurance (NT); The Tree of Life (2011); True Blood (2011) [Source]

ENO Invites Writer Will Self to Discuss Internet Dangers

Two Boys
"A teenage boy is stabbed. An older boy is caught on CCTV leaving the scene. An open-and-shut case, it would seem. But, as Detective Inspector Anne Strawson investigates the older boy's story, she uncovers a bizarre nexus of chatroom meetings, mysterious internet identities, supposed spy rings and disturbing cybersex, leading to a stunning conclusion. Loosely inspired by actual events that occured in an English industrial city, Nico Muhly's new opera is a cautionary tale of the dark side of the internet. With a libretto by Craig Lucas, screenwriter of Prelude to a Kiss and Reckless and video design by Fifty Nine Productions, whose work has been a key feature of such recent ENO triumphs as Doctor Atomic and Satyagraha, this new co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, New York, is directed by Tony Award-winner Bartlett Sher, making his UK opera debut. Some elements of this production may be unsuitable for those under 16 years of age." [Source]

Performances: June 24, 27, 29; July 1, 4, 6, 8 at 7:30pm. The cast includes Susan Bickley, Nicky Spence, Mary Bevan and Madeleine Shaw.

As a bonus, watch the composer discuss the work by clicking here.

Christopher Alden Takes on Naughty School Boys in Britten

(Photo: Alastair Muir)

Director Christopher Alden sets Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream in a boy's school with mixed results: "Thus, Oberon is the pervy, bespectacled Latin master with a pair of underage catamites, one of whom is Puck – Jamie Manton, too old - who turns out to be Theseus when he grows up, emotionally damaged (are you paying attention? It gets worse) and who relives the whole story in flashback whilst staggering around the stage like a slow-motion zombie. Tytania is the boot-faced drab Music mistress, forever vigorously castrating pupils’ writing tools in a pencil sharpener – geddit!!??!! – when not smoking the odd cigarettes which do duty for the 'love-juice' and lounging louchely up against the school’s dreary walls. The four lovers are all schoolchildren in uniform. The mechanicals are the school’s handymen and, I think, Sports master. The staging is claustrophobically confined to a triangular stretch of schoolyard bounded by two giant two-storey walls of classroom windows and corridors (designed by Charles Edwards) inside which the 'Fairies' – the other pupils – line up on both levels in order to make their crucial contributions and from

(Photo: Alastair Muir)

which the staging never once deviates. Bottom is not transformed into an ass, or indeed anything else at all: he merely takes his shirt off and – like everyone else in this miserable, interminable drivel – staggers around in slo-mo a lot, provoking the others’ holy horror for no visually discernible reason. Twenty minutes minimum of “ass” jokes thereby go for absolutely nothing, as does any sense of magic, mystery, atmosphere or, God forbid, fun. The lovers’ weary collapse at the end of Act II is accompanied by the school burning down, which, given that they’re inside it at the time, makes their decision to go to sleep there rather puzzling. The Act III Pyramus and Thisby sequence – performance-proof, I have always found in the past – is rendered so coarsely and grossly as to be virtually unwatchable in its Carry On Crassness (Snug, drunk, pisses up a wall and gets a blow-job from 'Thisby') ." [Source]

English National Opera Presents "The Return of Ulysses"

Tom Randle and Pamela Helen Stephen sing Monteverdi
(Photo: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian)

"In the intimacy of the Young Vic, a venue which seems to have a special gift of reining in and sharpening the more sprawlingly proportioned ENO, this had urgent, if doubtless to many irritating, impact. Andrews, an Australian theatre director, achieves shock impact by assaulting the senses, especially the visual. The use of big screens, as here projecting real-time close-ups, is already an operatic cliche which fights with the action and is best ignored. Stillness is an alien notion. Why stand on the spot to deliver your big, sensuous, ornamented aria when you could run, thrust your groin or, in one case, take your knickers off?" [Source]

High praise for the creative team after the jump.

(Photo: Johann Persson)

"Three components have made this joint production by English National Opera and the Young Vic remarkable: Monteverdi's music, Jonathan Cohen's musical direction and the ensemble work on stage. Cohen clearly knows every ounce of the score in depth and he lives the music while he superbly directs his forces. There are no histrionic devices; communication with singers and orchestra is governed by knowledge and respect for text and music. Notwithstanding the contradiction in terms, I would describe Jonathan Cohen as a humble star. Stage director Benedict Andrews has created extraordinary theatre. His singers don't keep going on and off stage: more often than not, they stay on stage – regardless of whether they should be there according to the libretto – and interact with the story line. This must be an exhausting experience for the singers but they become true parts of the whole rather than just playing their roles." [Source]