Word: siobhan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Dublin dialect, while invariably musical, is sometimes irritatingly impenetrable. In a troupe that plays well, but not always together, Cyril Cusack stands out as a sly, roguish charmer. Siobhan McKenna, a woman seemingly larger of spirit than any role she fills, makes Bessie Burgess a matron of blood, steel and tears. T.E. Kalem
Though two of the Abbey's finest actors, Cyril Cusack and Siobhan McKenna, returned for this production, the acting somehow seems stagey and lackluster. Surface characterization is emphasized at the expense of deeper emotional involvement. Siobhan McKenna plays Bessie Burgess with grandeur but drops the ends of her lines; Scorcha Cusack staggers a bit too much as Nora. Bill Foley, as Peter Flynn, says his lines as though reading them for the first time. Maire O'Neil, as the prostitute Rosie, makes immediate some of O'Casey's profoundest lines, his true revolutionary credo of communism--but her characterization slips...
...Londonderry fracas was just one incident in an anniversary week that left eleven dead and 150 injured across Ulster. Among those killed was four-year-old Siobhan McCabe, felled by a sniper's bullet apparently intended for a British soldier. Another was Samuel Llewellyn, 29, a Protestant truck driver who was delivering a load of paperboard in the Catholic Falls Road area of Belfast to help patch up windows shattered in a bomb blast the previous day. Although Llewellyn was making the delivery at the request of a Catholic welfare organization, he was dragged from the truck...
...here an admirable Viola--sprightly, intelligent, and a model of sanity in a world of absurdity. Her diction is clean, and her handling of the "Fortune forbid" soliloquy is particularly distinguished. But there is more beauty in the "damask cheek" speech than she is yet able to convey. (Siobhan McKenna's portrayal remains the yardstick for this part, as for Shaw's Saint Joan and others.) The plausibility of confusion between Viola-Cesario and Sebastian is helped here through Donald Warfield's soft, rather womanly portrayal of the brother (a role once played by a 19-year-old Marlon Brando...
...reply--"We fail?"--lacks the foreceful scorn, the reassuring incredulity needed to prop his weakening resolve. A sensual Lady Macbeth is perfectly valid, but the role requires a decided steak of masculinity, such as captured so imposingly in the portrayals of Dame Judith Anderson, Mrs. Tore Segelcke, and Siobhan McKenna...