Word: mckenna
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Producer's Showcase (Mon. 8 p.m., NBC). Somerset Maugham's The Letter, with Siobhan McKenna, John Mills. Directed by William Wyler...
...great acting challenges of the modern theater. None of the actresses who have played Shaw's Joan on Broadway-Winifred Lenihan, Katharine Cornell, Uta Hagen-has left a lasting stamp upon the role. At the off-Broadway Phoenix Theater last week, Irish Actress Siobhan (pronounced Shiv-awn) McKenna brought something a good deal more memorable to it. Her thick-brogued, almost blatantly peasantlike Joan was all drive and no dreaminess. She had an unshakable faith in her voices and her mission because it could never occur to her to doubt them; hers was a kind of fanatic...
Such undeflectable purpose, such one-track-mindlessness can have its acting limitations; and Actress McKenna plays with no great range and with a kind of fierce monotony. But by subordinating effect to essence, what Joan does to what Joan is, she makes an audience feel itself in close contact with someone, however rare, who is in close communication with something, however intangible...
...sovereign self and the sovereign institution, inner light and outer law. is magnificently projected. But Shaw did not solve his problem of making Joan personally real by making her slangily realistic and outwardly much like other people. Her reality lay in how she differed from them; and Actress McKenna, by eschewing something three-dimensional yet vaguely radiant for something one-dimensional but truly intense, comes much closer to revealing...
...Shakespeare when Broadway is visited by two famed repertory companies, the British Old Vic and the Jean-Louis Barrault-Madeleine Renaud company of Paris. For George Bernard Shaw's centennial year there is talk of productions of Major Barbara, The Apple Cart and St. Joan, starring Siobhan McKenna. Eugene O'Neill's posthumous drama A Long Day's Journey Into Night (TIME, Feb. 20) and his Moon for the Misbegotten (TIME, Aug. 4, 1952) will get their long-awaited first Broadway productions...