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by Jean Anouilh, adapted by Lillian Hellman,

directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg

Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford

August 11-October 29, 2005

“Or the Dodo”

In 2002 the Stratford Festival gave audiences the chance to see Christopher Plummer as King Lear in an uninspired production of Shakespeare’s tragedy.  Now the Festival gives us the chance to see Plummer’s daughter Amanda as Joan of Arc in an uninspired production of Jean Anouilh’s “The Lark”.  Famous names may be a draw but they mean little if they are embedded in a production that is not exciting in itself.

Anouilh’s 1953 play “L’Alouette” or “The Lark” in Lillian Hellman’s adaptation, presents the trial of Joan of Arc in which key events of Joan’s past are acted out in flashback rather than reported.   Anouilh knew that France had no Joan of Arc to defend its lands in World War II and, worse, had a government that collaborated with the Nazis.  “The Lark” looks Joan’s condemnation as a collaboration of the Catholic Church with the English.  American director Michael Lindsay-Hogg says in his programme notes he thought “some of the issues would become clearer to the audience” if he updated the setting from medieval France to France in 1943 under the Nazi Occupation. 

In fact, just the opposite happens.  Under Lindsay-Hogg the English become Nazis and Warwick, an SS officer decorated with the Iron Cross.  The Catholic Church, which in Lindsay-Hogg’s update should become the Vichy Government, remains, however, the Catholic Church and its representatives are costumed both as bureaucrats and churchmen.  Yet, if the court trying Joan is ecclesiastic, how is it that the Grand Inquisitor is played by a woman (Martha Henry)?  Women still cannot be priests much less attain so lofty a position.  And if she is the Grand Inquisitor why has costume designer Dana Osborne made her so inappropriately fashionable with mules, a leg-revealing skirt and jaunty miniature hat?

Anouilh’s text is clearly about the relations between secular and religious politics, but Lindsay-Hogg’s update has made it unclear whether the other half of Joan’s opponents are Catholic (in which case the Grand Inquisitor should be recast) or the Vichy government (in which case all the talk of religion makes no sense).  The 1943 setting also means that Joan becomes merely “a female resistance fighter” as the programme calls her which hardly accords with the all the special attention she is granted.  And who exactly is Charles the Dauphin in 1943 when France no longer is a monarchy?

As if this were not confusing enough, throughout the action the mattress of Joan’s prison cell remains on stage where Joan retreats when others talk.  Designer Osborne claims that “The play is Joan’s hallucination, a sort of dream”.  So what then are we seeing?  Is it Joan of Arc imagining she’s being tried in 1943 or is it an ordinary resistance fighter imagining she is another Joan of Arc?  The result of the directorial concept as realized by Osborne and set designer Eugene Lee is, in either case, a muddle.

Lindsay-Hogg, best known for directing movies and television, seems to have no clue how to translate action to the Festival stage.  Actors remain in fixed positions for inordinate amounts of time making this production one of the most static in recent memory.  The actors intone the words slowly as if they were all equally important.  There is no sense of rhythm or life.  The play is only two and a half hours long but the glacial pace, lack of focus and addled concept make it seem twice as long.

Does the presence of Amanda Plummer make the production worth seeing?  Only if you are addicted to seeing famous names on stage, I’d say.  Her way of communicating Joan’s spiritual and worldly innocence is to play her as a little girl in both voice and gesture.  This is fine in the early scenes when Joan is actually supposed to be a young girl, but becomes problematic as time moves forward and Plummer is still using her little-girl voice.  After all, when Joan was executed in 1431 she was 19 not 9.  The wide range Plummer achieves within these narrow parameters is surprising, but to find Joan unchanged either by battle or incarceration starts to make her look more dim-witted than otherworldly.

Plummer is surrounded by a number of fine performances.  Chief among these is Bernard Hopkins as the Bishop Cauchon, depicted by Anouilh as the one person who authentically wants to save Joan’s soul.  His pleading with Joan to recant make up the most moving moments of the evening.  The most successful of all the flashbacks is Joan’s visit with Robert de Beaudricourt played by Brian Tree.  Anouilh’s Joan, whose main insight is into male psychology, manages to get the comically dense Robert to give her a horse and an escort by convincing him that it was all his own idea.

As Warwick, Joan’s main secular opponent, Graham Abbey successfully uses the lower register of his voice (something he should do more often) to lend his character greater authority.  Lindsay-Hogg adapts Abbey’s real-life foot injury into the performance by having Warwick creep about on two crutches.  The trouble is that Lindsay-Hogg so wants Abbey to create a spider-like effect it makes Abbey (or Warwick) look as if he’d never learned to use crutches properly.  As for Martha Henry’s Grand Inquisitor, once you get over the inappropriateness of her casting and costume, she creates a wonderfully icy portrait of an ecclesiastical bureaucrat.  It’s too bad that Lindsay-Hogg forces her to sit in on stage in silence for the entire first act rather than have her make a surprise entrance in the second.  Stephen Ouimette is wasted in the role of the Promoter (the Church prosecutor), since aside from a few strident outbursts, he is confined to silence even longer than Henry.     

     

Steven Sutcliffe plays the role of Charles the Dauphin as if he were Bertie Wooster, and in yet another bizarre choice, Osborne has costumed him as a British twit complete with tennis racket.  Meanwhile, the young Sara Topham, with obviously fake grey hair, has been cast as Charles’s mother Queen Yolande.  She plays the role well, but greying young people’s hair for older roles smacks of amateur theatre.  Does the Festival really have no actresses of the right age for the part?  In other roles, Jean-Michel LeGal is an ardent defender of Joan as Brother Ladvenu, Ian Deakin is Joan’s brusque peasant father and Barry MacGregor is a stalwart Captain La Hire.     

Anouilh’s play has much to say about the creation of images for secular or religious propaganda.  Anouilh foresees the present in that his representatives of Church and State are more anxious how to “spin” the event than in Joan herself.  Given the relevance, Amanda Plummer and the right director and designer this might have been a triumph.  Instead, major confusions in both direction and design plus a leaden pace make this show a tedious experience.  It’s so earthbound and lifeless, it’s more a dodo than a lark.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Martha Henry and Amanda Plummer. ©David Hou.