"I think what would happen if you did - and it's a very good question - you would have these two men, and it would become a sort of theological battle. On how the play would be different with more characters Which is a very good way of not feeling so lonely." So I do feel a great communion, dare I say, with the audience. And then I tell this particular story, and I follow it as I'm in it, and the audience follow it with me. Most of the audience, whatever their religious denomination, have some sense of Renaissance art and those paintings of crucifixions, so nearly everyone has some access to it. So at least I can talk to her afterward and say, 'How did it go?' But on the stage alone, I suppose what happens is, I feel I'm surfing the story with the audience. I'm directed by a great friend, Deborah Warner, and so she's at the other end of the show. There's much talk of the small rabbits, but we didn't feel we could have a vulture and rabbits at the same time. There's a live vulture, but he's my only cast member. Except for a vulture - there's a vulture in the show, and that's very exciting. Though Shaw is the only human actor in the production, she does share the stage with a live vulture. She just feels he's endangering himself with every big grand gesture that he seems to be associated with. And she really found it hard to believe that he could work miracles. But of course, Colm has taken the story and diverted it slightly she has witnessed it, she didn't like what she witnessed, she was frightened of her son's - the crowds that he began to gather.
And she has a story to tell, and she says to them very forcibly that she is a witness. And to proselytize a religion based on the death of this man. "The premise of the play is that these guys want to write the story of what had happened some years earlier and to make it global.
It's really, I think, where the connection lies." But he has moved fundamentally it's a story of a mother whose son heads to terrible destruction, and her having to witness the destruction of her son - which is very painful, and in that way it's very like many modern women who may be the mothers of soldiers, or the mothers of revolutionaries. And Colm seems to have thrown a spotlight on her and sort of filled in, in a way, and he's diverted a bit from the Testament of the Apostles. So they've definitely kept her in a background role. "She's very little in the New Testament, you know she hardly ever speaks, twice or three times. On how this role moves Mary from the sidelines to center stage