<b>✭✭✭✭✩</b><b>
</b><b>by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Tim Carroll
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 25-October 15, 2017
</b>
Joan: “O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints?”
Tim Carroll, the new Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival, opened the 2017 season with his production of one of Shaw’s masterpieces – <i>Saint Joan</i>. Ontarians know Carroll best from the two children’s shows he directed at the Stratford Festival – <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/BA71A3A8-BD78-4425-B962-C6115CD2BC23">Peter Pan</a></i> in 2010 and <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/8661DE09-4DAC-4D7D-86D4-4B64030150EB">The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe</a></i> last year. Those who have seen his productions of Shakespeare, such as the <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/879AE2EB-C39B-4F2E-9829-0F737F22ADC6">Twelfth Night</a></i> that played on Broadway, will know that Carroll is an advocate of “original practices” or the effort to recreate the stage conventions of theatre in Shakespeare’s time. The surprise with <i>Saint Joan</i> is that Carroll adhered neither to the extremely detailed presentation of his children’s plays at Stratford nor to the very mannered fourth-wall-breaking methods of “original practices”. Instead, Carroll’s Saint Joan was a minimalist, nearly abstract presentation of Shaw’s play with an emphasis on clearly bringing out the meaning of Shaw’s text – thus exactly what a play by Shaw needs.
Judith Bowden’s set could easily pass for an installation at an art museum. The playing area is an elevated stone slab, one point toward the audience, on which stands midstage right a luminescent white cube looking very much like a large Japanese paper lamp. Extending from above the proscenium into a open trap in the slab is a shining white rod that balances the cube in how it divides the open space of the stage opening. Bowden’s set immediately evokes an atmosphere of timelessness, one where the specific historical action we will see played out is but one of many such actions.
Over time we come to see what the white cube means. When Joan first meets the French court, the cube rise to reveal all the courtiers crammed together inside. They are society and belong together within certain strictures. She is an outsider and solitary. Another time the cube rises revealing all the characters that Joan has met during the action. This only emphasizes even more strongly how totally alone Joan is in her endeavours.
The glowing rod is less easy to define except that it descends into an open trap and it is through that open trap that Joan makes her first appearance in the play. This suggests that the rod represents the <i>axis mundi</i>, the link between heaven and earth common to many religions, and Joan, as an earthly embodiment of the divine, firmly believes she is just such a link sent to the French in their hour of need.
Bowden chooses to costume the actors for the 21st century. There is no armour, only combat fatigues. There are no royal robes, but rather tuxedos and sashes. There is, thus, no attempt to distract us from the force of Shaw’s words themselves. Directors of older works are so prone to forcing a concept onto a play that it is refreshing that Carroll is willing to let Shaw’s text speak for itself. The result, paradoxically enough, is that Shaw’s play comes across not as a text written in 1923 but as one that could have been written yesterday. The play’s discussion of the role of women, of the function of religion and the state, of the practical expedience of removing people who disrupt established hierarchies are all so relevant now that we hang on every word, listening for how Shaw’s 20th-century analysis of 15th-century events will help provide clues for our own understanding of their 21st-century analogues. It is a production that is both emotionally and intellectually engaging.
Shaw structured each of the six scenes of the play around a miracle. First it is the sudden production of eggs on a farm, later it is the changing of the wind to favour the French in battle and the the end it is the miracle that her heart is left intact after she has been burnt at the stake. Most notable about Carroll’s approach is that he presents each of these miracles as ambiguous. He seems to follow exactly the definition of miracles made by the Archbishop of Rheims in the play: “A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. They may seem very wonderful to the people who witness them, and very simple to those who perform them. That does not matter: if they confirm or create faith they are true miracles”.
Thus, throughout the play Carroll emphasizes in each scene the need for faith of those around Joan, even among those who torment her, and then highlights how the “miracle” caused by Joan fills with faith that void that many characters did not even know they suffered.
Because of this approach, Carroll has no difficulty, as have previous directors, with the Epilogue Shaw wrote that celebrates Joan’s canonization in 1920. In Neil Munro’s production for the Shaw in 1993, he protested against the Shaw Estate’s diktat that the Epilogue be included by having his actors read it from lecterns in front of the curtain. In <a href="perma://BLPageReference/1A61D1E6-89FB-4AB4-B999-F4EC84265A8B">2007 Jackie Maxwell</a> dealt with it by dividing it in two and having half played before Scene 1 and the rest after Scene 6 to give the play a cyclical structure. With Carroll, however, the Epilogue appears as the natural conclusion of the play’s series of miracles – this last being Joan’s canonization itself, a notion even Joan finds difficult to believe.
Because of Carroll’s approach, the play does not feel overhung with tragedy as it did in either Munro’s or Maxwell’s productions. The ultimate genre of a medieval martyr play is comedy as witness, for instance, the 10th-century play <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/E9B7919F-991B-47AB-9583-E21664267711">Dulcitius</a></i> by Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim. As regarded only from the point of view of earthly life and human laws, Joan’s condemnation and execution appear as a tragedy. As regarded from the point of view eternal life and divine laws, Joan’s condemnation and execution appear as a triumph over all that is transient and corruptible. Before the Epilogue Shaw depicts how Joan comes to embrace death as a form of liberation. In the Epilogue this intimation is proven true.
All of this has a huge impact on how Carroll has Sara Topham portray such an iconic figure. For Neil Munro, Mary Haney’s Joan was a girl who braved the savagery of war only to become a pawn in a political power struggle between church and state. For Jackie Maxwell, Tara Rosling’s Joan was a girl who had to fight against male prejudice every step of the way until she came to realize that the times she lived in permitted no survival for one of her temperament.
For Carroll, Topham portrays a Joan unwaveringly filled with joy and optimism, so sure of the rightness of her way that she converts all those around her who are consumed with doubt. The genius of Topham’s performance is how she can endow virtue and innocence with such a superflux of persuasive vigour for nearly the entire length of the play. Topham’s Joan greets every obstacle as a new challenge and the greater the challenge the greater the energy it generates in her. This even includes that ultimate challenge of her trial and death. Here her momentary belief that perhaps her voices have abandoned her strikes us as it does her as a terrifying blow. Yet, soon enough she realizes, even if it is hard for us, that the thought of that abandonment was itself a challenge to be conquered.
Virtually all of the large number of supporting roles are well cast. Allan Louis is excellent as the skeptical squire Robert de Baudricourt, so stern it seems impossible that Joan will change his mind, but change it she does. Then in the Epilogue he is very sympathetic as a humbled soldier who gets one day’s holiday from hell for the good deed he once did for Joan. Wade Bogert-O’Brien is quite different from the actors usually cast as the Dauphin because we, like Joan, can see he has a nobility in him even if the Dauphin’s own insecurity prevents such insight. Jonathan Tan well contrasts two supercilious men – one La Trémouille, the leader of the French army who is justifiable angry when it is placed under the command of Joan, and the Canon de Courcelles, who comically can’t distinguish Joan’s petty infractions from her more important ones. Benedict Campbell is suitably self-important as the Archbishop of Rheims, Gray Powell is a fine Dunois, a no-nonsense military man who comes to understand Joan, Jim Mezon plays the Inquisitor as a man who truly believes he is helping to save Joan’s soul and Andrew Lawrie is profoundly sympathetic as Brother Martin Ladvenu, who shows Joan such compassion at her trial.
As was true in 2007, Scene IV set at “a tent in the English camp” proves to be one of the most intellectually invigorating scenes in the play. Here Earl of Warwick, representing the secular feudal world, and the Bishop of Beauvais, representing the world of the Church, 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. They see that she represents an enormously significant shift in the way that human beings will view themselves and that destroying her will not destroy that shift she represents. Especially intriguing now is that nationalism is again on the rise as is destruction in the name of religion. When Warwick says that people will begin to think of “England for the English and France for the French”, current events allow us to see a danger in this beyond the threat to the rule of barons which is all he sees. Similarly. when the the Bishop worries about people communing directly with God without the need for the intermediaries of the Church, we can see the threat of fanaticism beyond his fear of institutional obsolescence. Thus, the scene vibrates with even more relevance than in 2007 since, probably as Shaw intended, we can see that the paradigm shift Joan represents will bring new problems even as it sweeps away old ones.
Tom McCamus as Warwick and Graeme Somerville both give absolutely masterful performances. Even as the two reason and debate, each shows us he is in essence a wily politician playing with the other and seeking some purchase on his territory.
Even though the show is clad in modern dress, Carroll has infused it with beautiful choral passages from ancient settings of the Catholic liturgy such as the “Kyrie” and “Agnus Dei” with Steven Sutcliffe, who plays Joan’s Executioner, as the choral leader. The music reinforces the production’s overall feeling of timelessness since it places Joan’s martyrdom in sequence with the very origins of Christianity.
Carroll has provided us with a deeply insightful rendering of Shaw’s play and Sara Topham so beautifully depicts Joan’s combination of strength and innocence that any lover of either the historical or the literary characters will long to see it. The fact that Carroll’s production of Saint Joan is so different from the the Festival’s two previous fine productions of it only proves how great and essentially unmissable this play is. <i>
</i><i>
</i>©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Sara Topham as Joan with the ensemble; Sara Topham as Joan with the ensemble, ©2017 Emily Cooper; Andrew Lawrie as Brother Ladvenu, Sara Topham as Joan and Jim Mezon as the Inquisitor, ©2017 David Cooper.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.shawfest.com">www.shawfest.com</a>.
<b>2017-05-26</b>
<b>Saint Joan</b>