Saints of the Word

By T.E.K.

In the theater, the luck of the English has been the Irish. From Sheridan and Farquhar through Synge, Shaw and O'Casey, Irish-born dramatists have adorned English speech with tears, wit and poetic music. All the great Irish writers possess the gift for lightening or deepening the color of language. They bring to it both a larky playfulness and a brooding melancholy. They are the unofficial patron saints of English, and it is these saints of the word whom the distinguished Irish actress Siobhan McKenna is honoring in a superior one-woman show called Here Are Ladies. Selections for the off-Broadway program are drawn from Yeats and Synge, Beckett and Joyce, as well as others; they all mirror women as seen through Irish eyes.

Miss McKenna has a magnetic personality, and she knows how to populate a stage singlehanded. At the same time, she releases the audience's imaginative powers. What animates her performance is that she so obviously loves her people deep down in her bones. Delivering a ritual lament in Gaelic, she creates an atmosphere of runic awe; her body becomes a crucible of Irish antiquity and suffering.

An evening of this kind relies on a cultural remembrance of things past. Familiarity breeds content. Nonetheless, it is the singer who glorifies the song. Perhaps Siobhan McKenna's finest moments come in the two greatest Joyce monologues, "Anna Livia Plurabelle," from Finnegans Wake, and Molly Bloom's closing reverie from Ulysses. One is an ode to a river, the other to a woman. In Miss McKenna's delivery, the two are linked in a cascade of sounds and moods--drowsy, restless, tactile, sensuous--that, with a mounting lyrical intensity, evoke the eternal waters of life.

* T.E.K.

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