- OTHER MEDIA
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- ARRRRRG… A Most Notorious Woman
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- A Most Notorious Woman is a one-woman show about Gráinne
Ní Mháille, aka Grace O’Malley, the 16th century Irish
pirate who was the bane of those with the temerity to fish along the shores
of County Mayo, as well as those who supported the British stronghold in
Galway. A reasonably cosmopolitan and educated pirate, she spoke Latin
when she met with Queen Elizabeth.
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- Her story resonates with contemporary artists, as this script, originally
published by Maggie Cronin in 2004, joins a burgeoning parade of songs,
novels and biographies that have come out in recent years. A Most Notorious
Woman starts when Mháille was a young girl. It takes the audience
through her two marriages, the births of her four children, her meeting
with Queen Elizabeth, and ends when she is 63.
The set on the tiny EXIT Theatre stage was divided into several distinctly
different areas, including sections of ship sails, a rigging wrapped with
seaweed, a vaguely nautical-looking porch rail and a centrally-located
ship’s trunk that doubled as a table and cache for props. Other appendages
– such as the black outline of male character, popped out of the wall
as needed. One could not help but be impressed with how effectively Augello
uses the space around her, dipping behind a downstage sail to converse
with another character, emerging from another with a slight costume change,
and strutting upstage as a peeved Queen Elizabeth.
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- Unfortunately, the peeved Queen Elizabeth was the failing of the show.
At the outset, Augello played Mháille in the best tradition of historical
biography, which worked well for her. While I can understand the need to
put considerable distance between Gráinne Ní Mháille
and the Tudor queen, one would think there was enough space between the
Irish pirate and the imperial majesty without the need to turn the monarch
into a bad cross between Valley Girl and self-centered ingénue with
jewel-encrusted cell phone in hand. This came off as a Monty Python imitation
of Masterpiece Theatre – and not in a good way. Even worse, it gave
the feeling Augello wasn’t taking her characters seriously. I don’t
know how much of this was inherent to this script, and how much devolved
from this production – but I’d like to think it was from the
script, if only because Augello mustered such genuine feeling for her character
at other moments.
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- This one-woman show, with its multitude of characters, was demanding
at best. Switching rapidly between father, husband #1, husband #2, Queen
Elizabeth, Gráinne Ní Mháille and more, all in accent,
is close to impossible in an intimate venue like the Exit. However, a very
avoidable blurring between characters happened all too often as Augello
started the lines of a new character, without having completely abandoned
the physical persona of the first. I suspect this was more attributable
to opening night nerves, and trust that it won’t dog future performances.
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- This year’s DIVAfest continued its focus on historical drama with
Eleanor, a treatment of the story of Eleanor of Aquitaine, which opened
immediately after A Most Notorious Woman.
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