It has been a busy year for Susan FitzGerald. Now, after Austen and Tennessee Williams, comes Oscar Wilde, writes Belinda McKeon.
That cold stare. That withering wit. That repulsion for the Brighton line and its badly bred baggage. With the Gate Theatre production of The Importance Of Being Earnest opening next week, Oscar Wilde's most devastating woman is back in town. And, in the role of Lady Bracknell, the Gate veteran Susan FitzGerald is relishing her inner tyrant. "She's never going to be nice," she smiles. "In the play Jack describes her as a gorgon, so you should start as you mean to go on."
But for the actor charged with delivering the most memorable put-downs in as well-known and -loved a play as Wilde's salacious comedy, intimidation can be a two-way street. Tampering with a classic can be a heart-stopping exercise: if an audience feels you've gone too far in an interpretation of their play, you can face an auditorium of stony glares and silences to rival Lady Bracknell's. "Not only have the cast seen previous productions of Earnest, the audience has as well," says FitzGerald. "So you get that terrible feeling that they are going to say the famous lines two seconds before you do. You almost feel you've got to beat them to it."
One way this production will second-guess the audience is in the decision of Alan Stanford, its director, to have FitzGerald play her character much younger than she has been in previous productions. It makes sense, says FitzGerald, pointing out that in 19th-century England Lady Bracknell would have given birth to her daughter Gwendolen (to be played in this production by Fiona O'Shaughnessy) while relatively young. And, as she has spent the past six months playing demented old dears - Mrs Winemiller in Tennessee Williams's The Eccentricities Of A Nightingale and Mrs Bennett in the Gate production of Pride And Prejudice, which toured in May to Spoleto arts festival in South Carolina - the chance to wear a fresher face onstage must come as a relief. Or must it?
"Playing characters like Mrs Winemiller, you come out on the first night and the other actors are surrounded by well- wishers, but people just walk past me - they don't recognise me," she says. "But thank God! I'm glad I don't actually look like that."
Yet much as she praises the production's designer, Bruno Schwengl, for coming up with youthful costumes - "which give me a waist, a big challenge" - it's clear that what she looks like onstage matters far less to FitzGerald than what she can achieve there, such is the vision and the conviction with which she talks about acting. Truly great actors, she says, "live and eat and breathe" their craft, making for "phenomenal theatre", and they are rare - although she considers Lia Williams, so breathtaking as the vulnerable Alma Winemiller in The Eccentricities Of A Nightingale, to be among their number.
"I think people who devote that many hours in their day and their thoughts and their minds to what they are doing can only improve and improve," says FitzGerald. "And there is a terrific sense of achievement and completion in getting something as perfect as you know it could be. With a role, it takes a lot of work to get to the stage where you can hear clearly what you have in your head. It's like Nick Faldo said: everyone tells him how lucky he is, and he says to them, it's funny, the more I practise the luckier I get."
FitzGerald has her own method for creating a role, for "hearing it in my head"; an unconscious, almost writerly method that she has honed from her earliest performances with an amateur-dramatics group in her native Leicester, on to a "terrific" four years with Players at Trinity College in Dublin and down through her professional career with Irish Theatre Company in the 1970s and her long-standing relationship with the Gate. It's a method that sees her give, to anyone in her company, the most solicitous attention.
"In my daily life, I'm always listening," she says. "I could write a book about a half-hour chat with someone, about their aura, about how they were in their head and how they were physically. I try to get a feel of the person. And I don't even know that I'm doing it. And this feeds in to how I approach a part."
Such sharpness helps FitzGerald to find a foothold amid the layers of meaning that characterise Wilde's style; what she values most in the playwright is his sensitivity to the many, and the hidden, shades of human nature.
"Wilde understood language better than most. He understood Ireland's social position vis-à-vis England. Straddling two countries, two nationalities, he understood what it was to be both an insider and an outsider. And he understood sexuality; in this play the women behave like men, the men like women. He understood that not a huge amount separates the two sexes."
At the close of the 19th century, The Importance Of Being Earnest tapped into and exploited Victorian insecurity about the rise of the middle classes. At the beginning of the 21st century, FitzGerald believes, the play's core meaning resounds as loudly as ever. "Wilde was such a humane person. And in this play he said it's anti-human to use your power and your position and your prestige to attempt to keep someone else down for your own advantage. That is the cruelty of every strong society, to keep to themselves what they have achieved, and they try to knock everyone else off the ladder. And Wilde will always throw a spotlight on that and show that kindness and humanity are more important than social standing. In his time, it was a dodgy stance to take. But a very brave one."
Bravery and honesty are the responsibility of the "really clever and passionate" artist, she believes, a responsibility not only to their work but also to their country. FitzGerald feels strongly that the people of a country should be in touch with their "communal identity" and that only art can spark that vital contact. "If you go back in time, how can you recognise what a country was like to live in? You go through the literature, you look at the art of the time; that explains to later generations what was going on in people's heads, what the prejudices were, what the aspirations were, what drove people."
Theatricality feeds the sense of self; what was witnessed at the opening ceremony of last month's Special Olympics World Games "has gone into the souls of millions", she says. "We don't understand what art does to us. It changes us imperceptibly, from within. It changes our perception of ourselves, and it changes our perception of other people that might not otherwise have much contact with us, makes us more able to understand them."
Such, then, is the task of theatre. But it's a task made increasingly difficult by the external factors that have been the bane of every theatre professional for several years: unpredictable Arts Council decisions that have reduced professional theatre production and discontinued touring grants to professional companies in a country newly teeming with regional venues. Like her colleagues, Fitzgerald has a crow to pluck with the Arts Council.
"There is a huge lot to be said for community theatre and for the money that has been poured into these wonderful theatres all around the country," she says.
"But I don't think that should ever be confused with the crossover line where professional work starts. Whereas it's wonderful on its own terms, it must not be at the price of the work that the professional community needs to do.
"Like we saw in the terrific community spirit of the opening ceremony, you need the leadership of professionals to bring it all together. But to try to say that the professionals are somehow not that necessary and can be regarded as a luxury is madness. And I think that the present Arts Council has crossed over that line. That's my gripe."
But FitzGerald has no gripe about the job in hand, even though Good Friday has been her only night off this year. The Importance Of Being Earnest is, she calculates, her 69th play, and the processof bringing a show through rehearsal to opening night and beyond remains an exhilarating process of unearthing and understanding. And with Earnest - "the most perfect comedy that was ever written", she believes - there is always more to discover.
"Every time we come into rehearsal we realise that we've only actually scraped the surface of how much comedy is there to be mined. For every week that goes by we could add another 20 per cent. You find it in pauses, in approaches, and you realise that Wilde put it all there. Wilde knew all along."
The Importance Of Being Earnest opens at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, on Tuesday, with previews until Monday.
