Breaking The Fourth Wall: Report Of The Literary Dinner With Fiona Shaw at the FGLF

Published in Ceylon Today

        In a television or stage set there are usually three walls in which the dramatic action takes place. What is known as 'the fourth wall' is invisible to the audience, but is the implied metaphorical 'screen' through which the audience views the characters.

   When a character directly invokes the camera, or shows that she is aware that she is being observed, and speaks directly to the audience, she is said to be 'breaking the fourth wall'. An actor's interaction with the audience is a fascinating element of dramatic performance, and also a characteristic feature of postmodern art, in which the inner workings and processes of a performance are made transparent, increasing their apparent accessibility, relatability and audience participation.

     Instead of a smooth, polished performance which is presented to us as a fait accompli, we are given insight into the person who is presenting the performance and invited to 'step into the frame'. In a series of recent immersive theatrical presentations of Shakespeare's 'Richard III' in England, for example, the actress Emily Carding puts on a one-woman show, in the round, inviting audience members to take on the roles of the other characters.

       When you step into another person's mindset, whether through empathy, compassion or, as, in this case, having their character's role accorded to you in a role play, it forces you to step out of your 'otherness' to them, your objectivity and your biases and judgment. The stereotypes you initially view them through, the tainted, smudged and smeared hearsay of indirect 'knowledge', and preconception, dissolve, as you see life's events increasingly filtered and framed through their point of view.

      This offers us a dynamic and brilliant way of understanding the complex 'villains of the piece' in dramatic literature. And the actors who can enable us to see greater and more complex qualities in the characters they present on stage are justly acclaimed for their great talent, instincts, and the training they undertake, in order to offer us insight into the complexity of our shared human condition.


Fiona Shaw is an Irish actress, most famous internationally for her portrayal of Aunt Petunia in the 'Harry Potter' films. The character she plays in that series is a complex one, conflicted about her relationship with her sister Lily, Harry's mother, with her own feelings of inadequacy and rage tightly repressed, and viciously directed towards her nephew, 'The Boy Who Lived'.

J.K. Rowling's fictionalised portrayal of Petunia is one of the most interesting aspects of the story. It was left unfinished, in both the books and the film, a study of apparently inexplicable sibling resentment. Much about Petunia is nervously hidden from the prying neighbours, and she has become distorted in her character from years of misunderstanding of herself. She is profoundly out of her depth.

With the characters of Severus Snape, and Voldemort himself, we are encouraged to consider the causes in their own characters and circumstances which have created feelings of hatred and revenge in them, and turned them to the dark side. In Petunia, living in her ultra-neat pristine home in Privet Drive, we are shown the irony of a woman filled with scalding resentment, fear and vituperative hate, determinedly and obsessively cleaning her external environment of all apparent connection to what appears 'strange' or 'abnormal' (a world which she herself at one time wished to be accepted by). It is satire, in which the cruelty and dismissive mockery of the initial presentation is tempered over time into a more compassionate and moving portrait.

The shocking way she spits out the plosive consonants and hisses the sibilants when she initially expresses her dislike of her 'precious sister Lily... And that (James) Potter', is an indication that we need to see more, to 'see what breeds about her heart', as Shakespeare's King Lear said of his daughter Regan. 'What is it in Nature that makes these hard hearts?' The caricature hints at a tragic depth below the comical surface.

Fiona Shaw is a diverse actress, and has also played Medea and Mother Courage, as well as the complex protagonist of Ibsen's 'The Doll House'. She has also played Shakespeare's Richard II, in a performance which is mesmerising, even when viewed via teleplay.

The Fairway Galle Literary Festival offered three opportunities to interact with Fiona Shaw. She read Yeats' and Eliot's poetry from memory at a poetry reading, she gave a personal historical overview of the flexibility and resonance of the spoken English language, illustrated by short and intense  performances from dramatic texts, including sections of poetry from 'The  Wasteland'. This was a wonderful public performance, readily accessible to a crowded audience at the Hall De Galle.

But she broke the fourth wall in the most interesting and interactive way in the Literary Dinner which she took part in, at The Fort Printers in Galle, on Saturday 16th January. She was due to fly back to London a few hours after the dinner finished. It had been a hot and dusty day at the FGLF. She arrived with so little fanfare that she was moving amongst us without us actually realising, at first, that she had come.

      There were several tables of paying guests, and some initial undercurrents of anxiety expressed by some that Ms. Shaw would not descend and emerge from the high table and interact with the audience. She clarified her stance on this by starting the evening with a personal and autobiographical disclosure about her life in Ireland, and her wish to become an actress, which was a radical event in her conservative family.

She explained her attitude to the suffocating narrowness and the feeling of constant intrusive surveillance in her youth, which drove her to seek a bigger sphere in which to explore herself and her aspirations, and to seek entry into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She took us fluently through a fascinating creative life.

The actual dinner was not the focus of the evening, although the Rs. 7,500 fee per person made a seat at the table accessible only to a minority of those attending the Literary Festival. What we digested and imbued was the intelligence, verve, fierceness and vitality of what she was able to bring to us.

     She has given several interviews which are available online, and on YouTube, and I became aware through viewing these, after the event, that she has covered this autobiographical territory many times before. Yet what she says is true, and personal, and revelatory each time, rather than repetitive or mechanical.

      She came and sat with the guests at each table, and spoke to us one to one, finding points of common contact, and gently dispelling the bursts of star-struck enthusiasm directed at her with the self-deprecating irony of an enlightened, socially intelligent human being. It was her first visit to Sri Lanka, but she had studied some aspects of the history, culture and language, which was evident in the way she linked Ireland to Sri Lanka in its experience of colonial oppression, and its rich dramatic traditions of language use, particularly in regional folklore and idiom.

     I accessed a fascinating documentary which took the viewer behind the scenes of Fiona Shaw's performance of 'Mother Courage', and saw, 'up close and personal', her complete dedication to her art: the exercise routines needed to physically bear heavy costumes through a long performance, the way an actor's body and unadorned face is their artistic vehicle and medium, the total and radical unselfconsciousness she showed as she was filmed getting ready for her role.

At the Literary Dinner, in contrast to the colourful panoply of the Mother Courage costume, or the cornucopia of bloodstained garments she wore as Medea, Fiona wore a completely plain and unadorned,straight-up-and-down black dress.

      An actor I went to university with many years ago told me, while we were laughing about the 'image' that many artists feel compelled to present of themselves today, to enhance public appreciation of their profile and identity, (the emerging writers in vintage floral dresses posed in front of a window through which we can see Tuscany, the ubiquitous hipsters with their beards and berets), that it is actually the ongoing tension between appearance and reality that matters.

When a creative artist is young, they try out many different poses and stances: the flower behind the ear, the sunglasses half slipping down the face, the cult of personality. A lot of it seems artificial, and frankly fake, to the casual observer, but it is, according to him, a necessary phase, of finding what does and does not suit them. They are hunting through thrift shops full of relics of past icons and performers, finding what personally speaks to them. They are finding their voice, what lies beneath the postures and gestures, at first vicariously, through what resonates with them, experienced in the external world.

    They have to internalise the drama, he said, and resolve it, within.

     So - if I understood the importance of this understatement correctly - I would say that Fiona Shaw put on a great performance for us at the Literary Dinner. But it was a performance into which we were personally invited, on several levels. At this stage of her mastery: of her great talent and skill and the wisdom she has, the extreme inside working knowledge of a range of dramatic prose and poetry, she can put on a simple garment, relate like an ordinary person - and simultaneously reveal the intensity and depth of the colours and life experiences that she carries on the inside.