Anne Enright’s seventh novel ACTRESS meanders back and forward in time, only settling alongside Time’s Arrow in the final section, when Kathleen O’Dell, the subject, and Norah, her daughter and the narrator, slip towards Kathleen’s death in scenes that are limpid, as water is limpid coursing downhill from a snow-covered peak.
This hero, Kathleen O’Dell, is the element Water, a fictional Irish actress of stage, screen and radio, in the same way and in the same era of celebrities, as Maureen O’Hara, cast as the element Fire, Siobhan O’McKenna, cast as the element Earth and Grace Kelly cast as the element Air.
This episodic bio-novel of a fictional character loses sparkle as the narrator, Norah, gets older and moves more to the centre of the story. Norah’s own relationships and activities are charmless and uninteresting when compared to the mother’s. She is the more engaging of the two women. It is their relationship, a tortuous dissection of codependence, that fuels the story.
There is not much pizzazz in the book, though the prose and the imagery are ineffably elegant.
Why am I reading about them? What makes a book ‘good’?
I finished the book, enjoying some of the relationships, the anecdotes, the characters and the world bought clearly before me, yet I didn’t really care for any of them.
Kathleen O’Dell’s ambition and temperament drive the novel, prompting Norah to relate her mother’s life, and thus her own, to her husband. And to us, readers. The daughter seems jealous of the life her mother had: vivacious and varied, with pain, woe, joy, celebrity, riches and disregard. The daughter’s life is tepid, water gone off the boil and left to stand.
The world of the book, in particular shown in Dublin and Ireland, is glum, in a late 20th century way, with poverty, unemployment, emigration and repression as cornerstones of the new post-revolutionary state.
Just before reading it, I put aside another glum book of Dublin in the same era, John Banville’s 9th Quirke novel, THE LOCK-UP, which again presented younger women getting into bed with middle-aged and older men. I grew fed up of the fog of gloom in that book, but I stuck with ACTRESS.
Why do we read to the end of a book?
The 20th century ended with the unfinished business of revolution festering into violence once more. Kathleen O’Dell fraternised with gunmen and gun-women and made a ‘foolish’ trip to Derry in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday. ‘Foolish’ for whom and why?
I was at University College Dublin (UCD) at the same time as the narrator. Scenes in the book echo in my life. I was at the assault of the British Embassy in 1972, after a march of workers and students following the killings by UK forces in Derry. Two years later, city centre bombs in Dublin thumped us to a stop in the middle of a Gaelic football training session on the Belfield Campus Sports Fields.
All of this feels like ‘noises off’, away from the main action of the actress’ attempts to stay in the game, to clasp to herself forever her fey good looks and the winning charm that whisked her off to theatre land, then to stardom in the world of cinema.
The daughter enters adulthood in a commonplace way: relationships, college, work and sex, including the awkwardness and pain of ‘the first time’. She has unsatisfactory relationships with older men, academics and colleagues of her mother.
There is, as you might expect, an absent father.
Because of my own theatre practice, the early scenes with Kathleen and her parents touring across Ireland with Andrew (Anew) McMasters’ troupe were the ones I most enjoyed. Lists of small rural towns itemise an odyssey of art taken by a slew of accomplished Irish actors (and the great Harold Pinter, who learned the craft of theatre-making under McMaster’s tutelage).
He offered me six pounds a week, said I could get digs for twenty-five shillings at the most, told me how cheap cigarettes were and that I could play Horatio, Bassanio and Cassio. It was my first proper job on the stage.
I toured ‘fit-up’ productions of my Peace Process Plays in the late nineteen nineties. I took actors and kit in a van or, more usually, a saloon car, for two and three handers, with dates in theatre and non-theatre venues across Ireland and abroad. They were an artistic intervention and entertainments, in the faltering political and social process. An audience member quipped at the end of one performance that the two protagonists bickered and fought, but couldn’t live without each other. Like Laurel and Hardy.
Fire crackers were thrown under the back door of a hall, just behind the set. The actor hit the deck, recovered and continued the performance.
I said to him that no matter what else he did in his professional life, his performances in these fit-ups tours would stand among his best work. I met him years later, following a period working in West End theatres. He reminded me of what I’d said, agreeing that I had been right.
Like Kathleen O’Dell, the actors I know are among the bravest people I ever met.
There are three rapes in this book, one with choking. A person doesn’t consent to rape, except on stage or screen. Much of the contemporary representation of desire on stage and screen involves degradation, particularly of women. Think Saltburn. There is an amount of degradation in ACTRESS, notably around Kathleen’s relationships with producers and directors, amidst efforts to develop films that are never going to get made. The desperations and depredations of the film industry in Ireland, London and Hollywood burn through the gloom.
Kathleen has an interesting life-style, an Irish mid-20th century euphemism for an unmarried woman being sexually active, including with a Roman Catholic priest, who is more Father Trendy than Father Ted. He remains with Kathleen to the end.
Key reveals are deftly dropped in, as you read along, never tripping the reader up. They bob up further down stream, lithe as trout and just as tasty. Overall the characters lack brio. The scenes feel acted rather than lived.
Critical reviews are positive. Reader reviews, if the website Good Reads is any kind of guide, are mixed. And yet I liked it.
The sound of an electric typewriter echoes through early passages of the novel. Anne Enright was gifted one for her birthday and started writing for real. This is one of a number of notes the novel lifts from the writer's own life in the media and broadcasting world. She worked for a while as a producer on the seminal RTÉ television culture magazine Nighthawks, which launched the tv career of Kevin McAleer’s dry monologues, put to good effect more recently in Lisa Magee’s Derry Girls.
It is a good time to be reading contemporary Irish fiction. Readers draw from shelves full of riches, many lauded and award-winning. The publishing market in London remains keen on the work of Irish writers and Anne Enright is a star among stars. We’re lucky to be living alongside her work.
ACTRESS by Ann Enright: recommended, if you like good sentences; are nostalgic for an Ireland that is passed (thankfully) and if a peek behind the theatre curtain interests you.
Harold Pinter, on tour with Anew McMasters
http://www.haroldpinter.org/acting/acting_tourofireland.shtml
Father Trendy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrC6xrg24sM
Nighthawks, RTÉ1, with Kevin McAleer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPzXr8kZR-M
Plays in a Peace Process, book, Guildhall Press, Derry, 2008
Article by Sarah Resnick in The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/16/the-tragedy-of-celebrity-in-anne-enrights-actress
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