Former Fair City actress Lisa Dwan has "a hard time" dealing with stereotypical female roles and believes there are only "three gears" for female actors.
“There are three gears we’re allowed, the girlfriend, the bitch and the bimbo, " says the actress in an interview with Irish novelist Belinda McKeon in the Guardian newspaper. "I have a hard time playing these types of women. And if it’s corroding me, what does it do to young women looking for role models?”
Dwan, who is from Coosan, near Athlone, gained early fame in the TV series, Mystic Knights of Tír na nÓg, which ran from 1998 to 1999. She played Zoe Burke in the 2006 to 2007 season of Fair City
The actress has since gained fame worldwide for her stage performances of Samuel Beckett's work, notably in the Walter Asmus-directed Beckett trilogy, which united Footfalls, Rockaby and Not I.
Her latest venture, No's Knife, is a selection of Beckett's Texts for Nothing, conceived and performed by the actress herself. Dwan will perform almost naked on a stage which conjures `both an Irish bog-land and a battlefield.'
The work, which is co-directed by Joe Murphy, will run at the Old Vic in London from September 29.
Looking at Dwan's visceral, bold performance and signalling a reference in Beckett's text to womanhood, Belinda McKeon remarks that it is impossible not to think of the battle for abortion rights in Ireland.
“Of course it’s political,” Dwan says in the Guardian interview. “But you have to give the audience the space to find their own wounds. If I’m only talking about the disenfranchised women of the world, what about the men who feel that their identities are curtailed? What about the immigrants who don’t feel welcome in this country? "
The actress remarks that the danger of `overtly politicising Beckett' is that "you ruin all the connotations that other people might draw from him. He made these wounds universal.”
McKeon also brings up the subject of Waking the Feminists, a movement calling for gender equality in Irish theatre, which grabbed news headlines a year ago.
“Personally, I’m a little frightened of women," says the actress. "The greatest misogynists I’ve ever known have been women. We haven’t got to this position because women haven’t been complicit in it. I don’t think we’ve really examined our own self-hatred, how we have internalised years of contempt and turned it on ourselves.”
Dwan also says that she does not trust movements, saying: “But we have to start looking at what we do to one another. It leaves a lot of women I know - or maybe I should just speak for myself - very lonely. I’m very lonely.”
