'Big' Anna at the cutting edge

CULTURE SHOCK:AMONG GARRY Hynes's many achievements, one of the finest is the way in which, very late in their careers, she restored two great actresses to Irish theatre audiences. One was Siobhan McKenna, whose coruscating performance in Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire in 1985 ensured that she would be remembered not as a fading grande dame but as a great artist at the height of her powers.

The other was Anna Manahan, who died this week. It was Hynes’s production of Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1996 that gave Manahan the role for which she is most likely to be remembered – that of the wheedling, manipulative and desperately doomed Mags Folan. Although Manahan did a great deal before and after that fine performance, it is probably fair to say that by the mid-1990s, people under 50 knew her best for relatively predictable parts in soap operas.

Those amazing returns for McKenna and Manahan echoed each other – both directed by Hynes, both brilliantly supported by Marie Mullen, both playing apparently against type as rather unattractive (and unhygienic) old women.

This was more than mere coincidence. It arose from the ways in which the two women were similar – and similarly cursed. Both were, metaphorically speaking, large actors. They were, in some respects, throwbacks to the 19th-century heroic tradition of broad expressiveness and big emotion. They revelled in a kind of almost operatic theatricality that was not easily compatible with the more constrained style that became the norm in the television age. They needed writers (Murphy in McKenna’s case, John B Keane and McDonagh in Manahan’s) who could make the most of their physical presence, vocal power and linguistic skill, and directors who could give that flagrant theatricality a grounding in reality.

If, in the end, McKenna was the more supremely gifted actor, Manahan was unmatched for her courage and daring. In reality, her performance as Mags Folan, though it was shocking to those who knew her only from Fair City or the sitcom Leave it to Mrs O’Brien, was very much in keeping with her fearless career.

No actor, and few artists in any other field, did more to challenge Irish taboos about sexuality, womanhood and the body. In her fiery recent incarnation as a doughty fighter for the rights of older people, Manahan was simply drawing on a lifetime’s work as a proud and formidable rebel.

It makes sense that Manahan’s career was bookended by two strong women directors, Hynes at one end and Ria Mooney at the other. (Manahan was among a group of extraordinary actors taken under Mooney’s wing at the Gaiety School of Acting – the others included Milo O’Shea, Marie Keane and Jack McGowran.) Strong women would always be Manahan’s forte on stage, and in the conditions of Ireland, she required much of that strength offstage as well.

NOT FOR NOTHING were two of her most important roles those of women who were actually called “big” – Big Rachel and Big Maggie.

Those who saw her in her first big lead role, in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo at the Pike Theatre in Dublin in 1957, regarded her performance as Serafina as “magnificent”, “brilliant” and “her greatest triumph”. But, of course, that production was notoriously brought to a halt by the arrest of the director, Alan Simpson, on trumped-up charges of “producing and showing for gain a performance which was indecent and profane”. Manahan was seen by some as the woman who was in the dirty play.

“I remember”, she later told Des Hickey and Gus Smith, “my landlady being asked at the time what she was doing with an immoral woman in her house, and some of the semi-pro (actors) would cross the road when they saw me.”

Manahan was not intimidated. If anything, the traumatic experience seems to have emboldened her, as if, having withstood the worst that Irish philistinism could throw at her, she had learned not to care what philistines thought. She knew that theatre was one of the few things Ireland should be genuinely proud of: “One of the most important assets Ireland can lay claim to,” she noted acerbically, “apart from its archbishops and priests and handcrafts and bacon, is its theatre, which has a standing in the outside world.”

That pride gave her courage.

Her first big film role, shortly after The Rose Tattoo, was in She Didn’t Say No!, about a woman in an Irish village who has six children by different fathers. It was banned in Ireland. Her first London stage appearance was her creation of the role of Big Rachel in John Arden’s shockingly frank and violent Live Like Pigs at the Royal Court in 1958. That role, in turn, must have influenced John B Keane’s decision to create Big Maggie Polpin – another ground-breaking exploration of family, womanhood and sexuality — especially for Manahan. (She didn’t actually originate the part on stage, since she was playing in Brian Friel’s Lovers on Broadway, but she took it over for its Dublin run.) In the film of Ulysses, Manahan is brothel madam Bell Cohen, a whip-cracking lion-tamer with a top hat and waxed moustache, crushing Leopold Bloom with her impressive posterior. She took over Beryl Reid’s role as the eponymous butch lesbian in The Killing of Sister George on the West End and played the sexually rapacious Kath in Joe Orton’s black farce, Entertaining Mr Sloane.

These were all brave, cutting-edge roles for an Irish woman, especially one who was, offstage, as well-mannered, well-spoken and deeply respectable as Manahan. They marked her out as a genuinely liberated woman and an open-minded actor, willing to play dominant, sexually aggressive or offbeat roles. It was wonderful that, when Manahan was in her mid-70s, Hynes had the wit to tap into that inexhaustible fund of boldness and find again a woman who was not afraid to play out the grubbier instincts of life, knowing that, in her performances, they would never be merely sordid.