Fresh from a series of light roles, Rosaleen Linehan takes on the part of Bernarda Alba. She relishes the change, writes Patsy McGarry.
There's not much that is dark about Rosaleen Linehan. Which is probably why an actor such as she must don a somewhat more "antic disposition" when playing unsympathetic characters. She has played her share: Arkadina in Tom Kilroy's version of Chekov's The Seagull; Bessie Burgess in The Plough and the Stars; and Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest.
Here she is on Lady Bracknell, from a 1997 interview: "She's the first character I have ever played who has absolutely no redeeming quality . . . Bessie, for instance, becomes heroic, even Arkadina for all her faults is at least financially supporting all the others. But Lady Bracknell is a total Tory snob, \ doesnt talk to anyone. She just walks through people's feelings but no one listens to her bombast." Lady B, she concluded, was "flamboyant and totally unsympathetic".
Linehan, on the otherhand, could hardly be more sympathique, if flamboyant in a different way - in expression particularly. Hers is a democratic personality, naturally attracted to comedy. Yet she is now playing one of the most unattractive women in drama: Bernarda Alba in Federico García Lorca's play, The House of Bernarda Alba, which opens at the Abbey on Monday.
Many would put Bernarda Alba up there with Lady Macbeth in the pantheon of tough, cruel, uncompromising women who should bear men children only.
The Abbey production, directed by Martin Drury, has a formidable cast including Olwen Fouéré, Justine Mitchell, Gertrude Montgomery, Andrea Irvine, Isabel Claffey, Bernadette McKenna, Ruth McCabe, Joan O'Hara, Emma Colohan and Sile Nugent. All those women and she the dame, a mother from hell.
It is a dark, powerful play which engages more on the imaginative and emotional level than on the intellectual. One of Lorca's great three, along with Yerma, and Blood Wedding, this production is of a translation by Sebastian Barry.
In Linehan's view Bernarda is a woman who married down into straitened circumstances in a Spanish village, and who is determined to raise her daughters according to strict social custom whatever the cost. She enforces an eight-year mourning period on the five daughters after the death of her second husband.
This is done to protect the reputation of the house, and to court respectability by complying with the strictures of the church. As elsewhere, and later in Spain (it was written before the civil war in that country), severe repression in the Alba household creates an equal and opposite reaction, culminating in tragedy.
Incidentally, Lorca never saw the play. He was executed the year it was completed, in 1936, by a Falangist group at the beginning of the civil war.
Linehan believes Bernarda to be totally relentless, and a terrible snob. The character also has "so many male qualities" and "says the most extraordinary things such as 'the poor aren't human', as though [she were\] asking for a cup of tea".
Linehan says the harshness, the verbal and physical violence of the play probably exceeded anything to be found even in a comparative Irish village of that time, although she see similarities between the hugely dominant women of some John B. Keane plays and Bernarda.
She understands why the Irish take to Lorca, with his themes of sexual repression, religion, and power. She can "sort of" understand Bernarda", but recalls the advice of former Abbey artistic director Patrick Mason about such characters: "It is not for you to judge".
However, she believes Lorca did not like Bernarda very much, remembering he based the character on a real person.Linehan doesn't think many actresses are dying to play the part, either. So why did she take it on? She saw a production of the play in London in the mid-1980s, with Glenda Jackson in the lead and it was, for her, one of the great theatrical experiences. The role also came along at just the right time. She had played a series of "delicious" cameo roles in Gates of Gold, Stolen Child, and most recently Tartuffe, when Bernarda was offered to her and she decided to go for it.
In contrast, she very much likes Bernarda's five daughters, who have "beautifully defined personalities", and the servant played by Ruth McCabe. "That's the part I wanted. She's more human. There'll be no one waiting at the stage door to put a bullet through her head."
But it really comes down to extending oneself, "going places the imagination would not normally go", and without tripping into caricature. The trickiest bit was achieving the balance. As an example, she recalls the achievement of Olwen Fouéré in Steven Berkoff's production of Salomé at the Gate in 1987 and her performance with the bloody head of John the Baptist, which she had to at once mime and kiss.
She says the bottom line with The House of Bernarda Alba is that it's "a big meaty story about love, hate, revenge, and if we get it right it will be astonishing. It is great to be in something that is not ordinary." She had felt it was time "to get back on track again" following a series of lighter parts. It has been something of a pattern with her career, this following of light by shade.
She had "a delightful role" in the Joe Dowling production of Tartuffe which completed a successful run on Broadway in February. So succcessful, its box office take exceeded that of The Producers for three weeks in a row. And there was time for her to enjoy New York during the four months she spent there.
It's almost as if the light allows her a fallow period after such gargantuan tasks as playing Mommo in Bailegangaire, or her beautiful, poignant Kate in Dancing at Lughnasa, Feste in Twelfth Night and Madame Acati in Blithe Spirit. Has she a preference for a lighter or "shady" role? No. "Just good parts," she says.
Towering above all is her role as Winnie, in Beckett's Happy Days. There can be little doubt but this was one of the most perfect matches of character and talent in an Irish production for many a long year. Her Winnie in the mid-1990s Gate production of that play, with Barry McGovern and directed by Karol Reisz, was definitive.
When the Gate brought all 19 Beckett plays to New York in 1997, Clive Barnes of the New York Post wrote that her interpretation of the role was "among the best, ranking with \ Ashcroft and \ Renaud". Linda Weiner in Newsday found her Winnie, "a heroine . . . with enormous emotional impact, but one more disconcertingly angry than doggedly cheerful, more sarcastic than earnest in her blithe optimism about each 'happy day' ".
In The Irish Times that year, Gerry Colgan wrote of the production: "it is Rosaleen Linehan, who uses her special flair for comedy to project her physically static character into the audience's consciousness. She brings to her role immaculate timing, a versatile voice and mobile features, all of which combine to fill her lines with the sense of an interpretation which is funny, meaningful and complete . . . It is a wonderful performance, gripping and satisfying."
In November that year, when Happy Days ran in London, the Sunday Times described it as "one of the finest readings" of this play. Michael Billington in the Guardian wrote: "Linehan, who brings out the Irish speech rhythms inherent in the language, is up there with the best interpreters of the role: she declines from Foxrock matron to panic-stricken prisoner without ever suggesting total defeat."
As for herself, modestly she will only say it is "a gorgeous, luscious" role, and believes every actress should do Winnie.
But not every actress can. She recalled how Beckett always liked music-hall people, "the feel of music hall" and the burlesque of its comedy. She believes Winnie was probably a singer in her day, even finally humming the waltz from The Merry Widow.
In general, she says, "You can't fool yourself in comedy. If it's not happening you know it." In comedy, an actor has to be harsh on him/herself, as in commercial theatre. Such rigour over the yearsmeans that now, for her, nothing any critic would write could compare with her own criticism of herself.
Comedy is much more difficult than tragedy, she says, commenting, almost as an aside, that the ending in most comedies most likely leads on to tragedy anyhow.
The House of Bernarda Alba opens at the Abbey theatre, on Monday. There is a post-show discussion with Martin Drury and the production team next Wednesday at the Abbey, and a post-show discussion with Martin Drury and the cast on Tuesday, April 29th. A pre-show talk entitled "Lorca's Rural Dramas" by Dr Maria-Isabel Butler Foley, formerly of the Department of Spanish, UCD, runs at 6.30 p.m. on Thursday, May 1st.