Love blooms in Brooklyn for Saoirse’s Irish rose
SAOIRSE RONAN, who first came to our attention in t he award-winning film Atonement, playing Keira Knightley’s younger sister, makes her stage debut — on Broadway, no less — as the vindictive Abigail Williams in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
I revealed a few months back that Sophie Okonedo will play Elizabeth Proctor in the drama, directed in the spring by Ivo van Hove. But it’s also rumoured that Ben Whishaw will play John Proctor (it would be his New York debut, too), though producer Scott Rudin won’t officially confirm the casting for a while.
Ms Ronan was giving nothing away when I spoke to her at the Soho Hotel about another project — Brooklyn, a beautifully realised movie based on Colm Toibin’s bestselling novel.
In the picture, Saoirse, 21, plays Eilis Lacey, a girl from the town of Enniscorthy in County Wexford who emigrates from Ireland in the early Fifties to live and work in the New York borough.
After bouts of homesickness, Eilis meets the handsome Tony, played by up -and - coming American actor Emory Cohen.
‘The amount of sexual tension is palpable,’ Ronan told me of their relationship. ‘But physically, they have to be restrained. It’s the times. You couldn’t fall all over each over in public.’
Things are even more chaste when a family tragedy forces Eilis to return to Ireland, where she has a fling with a well-to-do local lad played by Domhnall Gleeson.
‘This is Ireland in the Fifties. That meant NO touching!’ she said. Her voice changed suddenly, taking on the timbre of the town gossip. ‘I saw the glint in the corner of your eye when you looked at him. You hussy, you! You’ll be shipped off to work in the laundry,’ she said, blue eyes f l ashing. Ronan’s vital central portrait is of a woman forced to choose whether to stagnate in small-town Ireland — or blossom in Brooklyn.
When she first arrives in the U.S., she’s packed off to live in a boarding house under the eagle eye of Mrs Kehoe, played by Julie Walters ‘like Dinner Ladies’, Ronan joked.
Eilis works in a department store and takes night classes in accounting, but pines for her mother and sister.
‘I was in the middle of the exact same journey,’ she told me, having left home in Dublin and moved to London six months before filming began. ‘Everything was very raw with homesickness.’
One aspect of the film surprised me. It’s the first time that the actress, who was born in the Bronx, but whose thespian parents soon moved back to County Carlow, has played an Irish character.
She explained that until Brooklyn came along, she hadn’t read a script that f eatured an Irish character she wanted to play.
‘For a long time Irish films were about the IRA, the Troubles or set in the 1800s on a bloody farm!’
Brooklyn, which is directed by John Crowley from a screenplay by Nick Hornby, will likely pop up during the BFI London Film Festival in October, before going on general release on November 6.