Daily Inspiration Quote by Fiona Shaw

There is a sly flex hiding inside that seemingly modest complaint. “I can hardly decide what plays I should be in” sounds like indecision, but it lands as a portrait of abundance: the rare, delicious problem of having too many good options. Coming from Fiona Shaw - an actress whose career has moved between high-art theater, prestige television, and unapologetically strange choices - the line reads less like dithering and more like a quiet claim to agency in an industry built to ration it.

The verb “should” does most of the work. It’s not “want,” which would be purely personal; it’s “should,” which smuggles in duty, taste, reputation, and politics. For a stage actor, every role is a public argument about who you are: classical rigor versus contemporary risk, leading roles versus ensemble work, the pull of a director, the pull of a text. Shaw’s phrasing acknowledges that the decision isn’t just aesthetic, it’s vocational and moral - the perpetual calculus of how to spend a finite body and voice.

There’s also an implicit gendered subtext. When women in theater reach a certain age, parts narrow, and “choice” becomes a luxury men often take for granted. So the sentence carries an extra charge: a performer insisting on breadth when the culture expects contraction. It’s light, almost throwaway, but it’s also a small manifesto: the career as repertory, not runway; artistry as curatorship, not mere booking.