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by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Jackie Maxwell

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

May 9-October 27, 2007

"Rosling Triumphs as Saint Joan"

Whatever you do this summer, don’t miss “Saint Joan” at the Shaw Festival.  In an absolutely riveting performance as Joan it stars Tara Rosling, a woman who was born to play the role.  Director Jackie Maxwell misses none of Shaw’s intellectual points but still manages to give the work such a strong emotional pull that its conclusion is devastating.

Unlike so many of Shaw’s other theatre works that follow the structure of the well-made play, in “Saint Joan” Shaw was influenced by the early English chronicle plays and divided the action into six scenes each revolving around one of the miracles thought to be performed by Joan.  It escalates from the sudden production of eggs on a farm to the miracle of her execution at the stake that left her heart intact.  The Epilogue that deals with Joan’s canonization as a saint in 1920 almost 500 years after her death has often been a sore point for directors.  In the Festival’s last production in 1993, director Neil Munro had the cast read the Epilogue from lecterns in from of the curtain.  In this production, only the third in the Festival’s history, Maxwell has cleverly divided the Epilogue in two with the first part serving as a Prologue to the action.  Here Maxwell imagines a ghost world where soldiers from World War I meet Joan and ask her about her death.  Seeing the same characters again at the end gives the play a cyclical structure that masterfully reinforces Joan’s last lines, “O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?”

What makes Rosling’s performance so remarkable is that she is so inside her character that she makes every aspect of Joan’s behaviour seem perfectly natural and believable.  She appears so radiant with her convictions that she does represent the paradoxical combination of simplicity with a superhuman force that no mere mortal can withstand.  Because of the innocence and joy she so fully embodies it is truly heartrending when she is confronted with the pyre her voices told her she would never have to face and she momentarily loses faith in them and recants.  People think of Shaw as coldly intellectual, but as Rosling and Maxwell prove his plays can have an enormous emotional impact.

Rosling’s great performance is reason enough to see the play, but she is blessed with a flawless supporting cast.  Ric Reid carefully distinguishes his two roles of comically skeptical squire Robert de Baudricourt, the first to help Joan on her way, and the grave and imposing Inquisitor, who really does believe what he does is for the greater good.  Harry Judge is appropriately infuriating as the simpering Dauphin, who can’t recognize what’s good for him.  Norman Browning is filled with supercilious menace as the Archbishop of Rheims and seems to be a demon in disguise as the Executioner.  Thom Marriott plays two hotheads, first La Trémouille, the arrogant leader of the French army and justifiable angry to have it placed in command of Joan, and later the prosecutor Canon d’Estivet, who can barely conceal his hatred for her.  Patrick McManus is excellent at capturing the nature of the French commander Dunois, a tough, military man with sensible, even a sensitive side.

Shaw devotes Scene IV set at “a tent in the English camp”, to a debate about the greater meaning of what Joan represents.  In itself it is a fascinating discussion as the Earl of Warwick, representing the secular feudal world, and the Bishop of Beauvais, representing the world of Catholicism, come to realize that Joan symbolizes something new and dangerous to them both--“protestantism” and “nationalism”.  What they imply is that she also symbolizes the beginnings of an individualism that requires neither church nor state.  This is the kind of intellectual debate that those who don’t like Shaw point to to support their case.  Yet, they should see how masterfully this kind of scene can be staged.  Blair Williams as Warwick and Ben Carlson as Beauvais are not talking heads but present characters with quite distinct personalities.  Williams makes Warwick elegant but evil, a man with an overwhelmingly malevolent air who seeks any excuse to obliterate a threat to his power.  Carlson makes Beauvais learned and cautious, a man who also sees Joan as a threat but seeks rational support for her extermination.  Both actors seem to come upon the concepts they discuss as if for the first time making both the debate and its ideas exciting.  In contrast Peter Krantz plays the doltish English Chaplain John de Stogumber, whose unthinking bigotry against the French comically contrasts with sinister reasoning of Warwick and Beauvais.  Krantz later plays de Stogumber’s conversion to Joan’s cause after her execution with raw, transfiguring emotion. 

Even the smaller roles are well cast.  Martin Happer is both a cool and dapper Gilles de Rais (better known as Bluebeard) and later the young pigheaded Canon de Courcelles, who can’t distinguish the small issues from the big ones at the trial.  Douglas E. Hughes has quiet but unyielding demeanour as Captain La Hire, one of Joan’s few staunch defenders.  Andrew Bunker contrasts the slowish provost-marshal Bertrand de Poulengey with the ardent Brother Ladvenu, who does all he can at the trial to save Joan from burning.

Sue LePage has designed a unit set of stairs and a door lintel that readily can stand in for any of the locations required, especially when so precisely lit by Kevin Lamotte.  Her costumes successfully suggest World War I uniforms from the waist down with medieval trappings from the waist up.  This captures both the double perspective of the play--a 1920s play written about 15th-century events--but also carries into the design the universality emphasized in the prologue and epilogue.  Similarly, Lamotte creates a panoply of stars, seemingly a reference to a painting by Anselm Kiefer, that begins and ends the play and covers scene changes and places the action in an atemporal context.      

This is a great play insightfully directed and flawlessly acted with a spectacular central performance.  Actors who are as perfect as Rosling is as Joan don’t come along very often.  See her while you can.                

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Tara Rosling. ©David Cooper.