I’m not what you’d call a big fan of the theatre. As I child I was marched to a couple of pantos and in the intervening years I’ve seen a few musicals and, most recently, the long-running and ever so slightly creaky but fun adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black. So I’m not exactly Kenneth Tynan. However, a few weeks ago, while searching for something different to do, we stumbled across talk of a new play at the National Theatre. It purported to deal with religious fanaticism, nationalism and the end of the feudal era. Given that it didn’t involve puppets singing about porn and shagging, I thought it sounded like fun but it has taken until now to get my hands on the tickets.
For my first piece of “proper theatre”, I could not have chosen better than Marianne Elliott’s staging of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. Full of ideas, drama, action and spectacle, the play is beautifully staged and left me ever so slightly in love with the theatre.
Having never been to the National Theatre before I was struck by how much nicer the theatre felt to the claustrophobic and chintzy Victorian theatres that make up London’s West End. The stage was made up of a huge and slightly slanting black square which would alternately rotate and elevate on hydraulic rams. This misleadingly simple set design flanked by dead trees proved remarkably evocative, as did the stomp-style dance routines used to evoke battle. Accompanying this visual spectacle was live music featuring incredibly powerful and mournful song switching between sacred Latin music and the Arab cries of a distant muezzin. As a sensual experience, Saint Joan combines minimalism with Brecht-style evocation and powerful set-pieces such as the battle and the inevitable burning of Joan as a witch.
The performances were equally impressive. Anne-Marie Duff’s Joan is a blend of naïve innocence and raw cunning. One moment she is chirpily demanding (and fully expecting to get) a horse and armour from a sceptical local lord and the next she is buttering up the Archbishop and arching her back as a cat while she says that’s she’d “loooooove” to see the Dauphin sitting on his throne. An unending font of subtle moods and powerful emotions, Duff’s performance is mesmerising in its complexity. She is ably supported by Paul Ready as a hilariously petulant and weedy Dauphin who quickly finds courage when it comes to hoping that the politically unpredictable Joan would “just keep quiet”. Also superb are Paterson Joseph (Johnson from the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show) and Oliver Ford Davies as Joan’s clerical persecutors. Joseph’s Bishop Cauchon is wonderfully conflicted as he tries to both save the power of the Church and Joan’s immortal soul and Ford Davies perfectly embodies the cold but air-tight logic of the inquisition that makes it clear that whatever cruelties it dishes out to potential heretics are as nothing compared to the suffering that can come from a weakening of the authority of the Church. The “secular” actors are also superb with Angus Wright’s Earl of Warwick combining the public school ease of the English upper classes with the detached Machiavellianism of an old political warhorse. Indeed, the only bum note was that provided by the trial’s prosecutor whose few lines weren’t so much delivered as thrown at the audience in the manner of someone emptying a chamber-pot out of a Dickensian window.
The play itself has an asymmetrical three act structure.
The first act deals with Joan’s emergence as a military leader and shows her using her powers of persuasion on French nobles both minor and major climaxing in the breaking of the siege at Orleans. This includes the famous moment where Joan is able to pick out the Dauphin from among the assembled courtiers and here is where Shaw shows his really intellectual muscle as up until this point the play is a lively historical piece but then an Archbishop explains to the King’s Chamberlain how it is that Joan will manage to pick out the Dauphin and how it will be a miracle in so far as a miracle is anything that increases people’s faith regardless of its origins. However, rather than falling into the trap of having all churchmen be scheming politicos, Shaw pulls the rug out of us by having the Archbishop be the first to experience the miracle of saint Joan. Wily old fox the Archbishop may be but he is also a man who is prone to flattery, especially when it comes from a 17 year-old girl.
The second act is perhaps the most cerebral of the three as it uses the Earl of Warwick and bishop Cauchon to examine exactly what it is that bothers the status quo when it comes to the status quo. The two men conclude that the problem is that religiously, Joan speaks not of the church but of God and herself, suggesting that no one stands between a man and his God. As Shaw correctly and anachronistically points out, this is the root thought behind Protestantism which argues that it is not the Church’s place to save people but God’s. The idea that it is the Church that absolves people of their sins is what lies behind indulgences, the idea that by giving money to the church for “good causes”, a rich man might spend a little less time in purgatory. Similarly, on a secular level, Joan speaks not of the nobility but of the King and herself, suggesting that nobody stands in between the people and the executive. This contravenes the idea that people ultimately serve their lords and that those lords then help determine who it is that is king as laid out in magna carta. This explains why Joan poses such a danger to the status quo and why, should she be captured, nobody will come to save her or offer ransom for her release. Her powers of motivation are not worth the cost of the threat her ideas pose to the Church and the nobility.
The third act deals with the trial of Joan and the attempts by the priests to get her to recant her heresy and therefore save herself. Here again, it would have been easy for Shaw to fall into the trap of having the priests be eager to condemn them but in truth, the churchmen strive as hard as they can to free Joan only for Joan to tear up her confession when she learns that even if she recants she will be locked in a dungeon for the rest of her life. This is a remarkably potent scene largely because of the inquisitor’s laying out of the logic the tribunal operates under. Once he has made it clear that heretics must be dealt with cruelly so as to avoid further cruelties later, it becomes clear that the priests are all locked into this way of thinking and that this way of thinking prevents them from letting Joan go despite her obvious innocence of the charges of heresy and witchcraft. The third act ends with Joan being burned.
The three acts hang together only loosely and suggest that rather than necessarily being all about the life of Joan, the play is more a means of polemically exploring a number of ideas such as the nature of religion, the nature of the nation state and the role played by conviction in politics. However, somewhat unfortunately, Elliott chooses to include the not always performed coda to the play that features Joan teasing her former persecutors in heaven and ends with a speech about how the world was not ready for one such as Joan. The problem is that the play’s three acts are incredibly even handed. Joan is neither a villain nor a heroine and neither are the people who oppose her. So to end the play on a slightly cheesy speech about how great Joan of Arc was seems somehow jarring as nothing in the play suggests anything to the effect that the world might not have been ready for her or even that she was necessarily a “good thing”. Joan was an agent for change and the change she brought (according to Shaw) was the philosophical basis for Protestantism and Nationalism... but neither of these intellectual movements are necessarily “good things” either. In fact, the kind of “greater France” nationalism espoused by Joan is very similar to the kind of “Greater Germany” nationalism that Hitler would later use in his attempts to justify the annexing of half of Europe. The other problem with the inclusion of this coda (aside from it being thematically at odds with the rest of the play and providing the play with two extra entirely unnecessary endings) is that at over three hours long, the play is astonishingly long. When, at the end of the play the action looped round to the beginning of the first scene so as to suggest that Joan’s fate is a common one in human history, there were a number of relieved sighs when the lights went down instead of launching another scene. Indeed, I can’t help but feel that if the coda were dropped and two intervals were used instead of one that it would make for a play that allows for greater concentration about serious ideas instead of a final ten minutes spent consumed by the thought of how monstrously uncomfortable the National Theatre’s seats are.
That minor quibble aside, I can only recommend that anyone who is in a position to see Saint Joan immediately snatch up some tickets. It really is everything that theatre should be.
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