McKenna Speaks at Pudding

"I love children," said Siobhan McKenna during her visit to the Hasty Pudding Institute Friday, "because they are not childish--they are child-like. Children are wonderful because they want to be possessed. I love to work with them, to stand on the stage and hold them in the palm of my hand. This is total involvement, and this is what I believe in."

Miss McKenna, who has had a long association with the Cambridge Drama Festival, played the title role of St. Joan in the summer of '56, and the part of Lady Macbeth last season. On Broadway she has starred in The Rope Dancers and The Chalf Garden.

"I'm an author's girl," she pronounced. "I believe in the author who one day sits down and writes a fine and sensitive play. But, she added, "I can't stand the author at rehearsal." There his sentivity becomes so destructive the actor "wants to kill him before he destorys his own work," she explained.

In reply to a question about theater criticism the actress declared that criticizing a play is difficult because theater is too spontaneous a medium, too fitting for its moment, to be thought out in an alien way later on. Critics must learn that to be kind to a play they must lash into it, she explained. The critic who praises a bad play, or even a mediocre one, she said, fails to understand the cruelty of being so kind.

Actors should not depend on applause, she concluded. A laugh, a spirit, cannot be planned. "And I didn't come here today to make you laugh," she added. "We just met. And that is the way it is."