St Joan by Bernard Shaw
St
Joan
by
Bernard Shaw
at
the Lyric Theatre, Belfast
Production
information
Press
night September 15, 2016
Authors George Bernard Shaw
Adaptation Philip O'Sullivan
Director Jimmy Fay
Set Grace Smart
Lighting Ciaran Bagnall
Sound Conor Mitchell
Technical Keith Ginty (technical manager), Philip Goss
(set builder)
Stage
manager Kate Miller (company
stage manager)
Production
manager Alan McCracken
Cast
includes Alan McKee, Abigail McGibbon,
Lisa Dwyer Hogg, Rory Nolan, Philip O’Sullivan, Tony Flynn, Kevin Trainor,
Eimear Fearon
Casting Clare Gault
Producer Lyric Theatre, Belfast
Running
time2hrs 30mins
There have been countless
theatrical depictions of Joan. She is a
character in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part
1 (1590) where her initial piety is exposed and she is rightly, according
to Shakespeare, burned at the stake. Shakespeare’s
depiction is often seen as being biased and he has been accused of churning out
propaganda in his plays to please his political masters, the Tudors. The German Enlightenment era dramatist
Frederich von Schiller also depicted Joan in his play Jungfrau von Orleans (Maid of Orleans, 1801) where she is a
romantic precursor of Enlightenment values and the great nationalist upheavals
of that time. Schiller offers
significant revisions of the legend of Joan in order to make her story fit his
times. Bertolt Brecht also succumbed to
the story of Joan in his play St Joan of
the Stockyards (1930). Brecht’s St
Joan is a labour organiser in Chicago, a martyr to the new cause of Marxism
which Brecht suggests that she pre-figured. Furthermore, there are operatic depictions of
Joan by Tchaikovsky and Verdi that follow Schiller as well as numerous depictions
of Joan in paint and sculpture.
Shaw’s play is rather
discursive pushing events into the background and foregrounding all the
arguments that the protagonists become involved in. Joan is depicted as an innocent, caught up in
political and religious machinations which she does not understand but haunted
instead by voices and visions. As Shaw says
in his preface to the play:
There are no villains in
the piece. Crime, like disease, is not interesting: it is something to be done
away with by general consent, and that is all [there is] about it. It is what
men do at their best, with good intentions, and what normal men and women find
that they must and will do in spite of their intentions, that really concern
us.
Joan is played by Lisa
Dywer Hogg who encapsulates her physicality, intensity and consequent
contrasting frailness. Joan dreams of a
France free of English authority and jurisdiction, she aims to lift the siege
of Orleans and crown the Dauphin at Rhiems cathedral. To accomplish this, she wears men’s clothing
and wages war against the English and their Burgundian allies. Joan’s main antagonist is Richard de
Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, portrayed as an oily and cynical interlocutor by
Tony Flynn, representative of the English crown in France. Warwick is a master of Realpolitik who understands that Joan’s visions may not go away
even if her body is destroyed. His
scepticism is counterpointed with Joan’s idealism and the bureaucratic
theorising of the church. Warwick’s dry
attitude is further contrasted with his chaplain, John Stogumber, who
represents unconscionable condemnation of Joan until he ultimately realises the
true penalty of her heresy and death at the stake.
Director Jimmy Fay does
away with the Medieval trappings of the story setting the play in an office
where papers are strewn, filing cabinets overturned and presumably computers
hacked. In other words, the modern world
an audience is familiar with in which individuals are reduced to card or
computer entries, to mere numbers bereft of anything so idiosyncratic as voices
and visions. An excellent music score by
sound designer Conor Mitchell and the powerfully reductive, claustrophobic
atmosphere of an office environment actually emphasizes the points Shaw makes
and creates a suitably stultifying context.
However, the directors use of anachronism seems laboured since Joan was
steeped in the Medieval world where most communication was word of mouth and
few documents were rendered let alone files, emails or blogs (although the
transcripts of the trial were available to Shaw and they form the basis of his
play). Indeed, it was a world where
anything so personal as voices and visions were distinctive enough especially
as Joan was also lucid and intelligent. The
transposition is pregnant with possibility yet seems only a trivial conceit
since the contrasting worldviews are so totally opposed. The director seems at pains to point out how
relevant Joan is. Yet she seems to belong
to another world containing an untranslatable world view. She is certainly someone who could be
rendered as a visionary and revolutionary but not in the way we understand
these terms. Shaw also depicts Joan as a
precursor of the Reformation which seems to stretch a point also contested by
historians although she commits heresy in the eyes of the church by following
her voices and visions (her conscience) rather than church orthodoxy. This was to be the keynote of Protestantism
which affirmed the individual’s conscience against the distant calculations of
a monolithic papacy represented in the play by Peter Cauchon, Bishop of
Beauvais, the Inquisitors and church officials.
The church is at pains to be legalistic in its approach and provide
evidence of sorcery, heresy yet it is obviously a puppet of English politicians
and soldiers in France. The play has
also been heavily abridged and the epilogue, where Joan returns years after her
martyrdom to face her accusers once again, has been removed.
Shaw’s play, premiered in
1924, concerning itself with the events of the 1430s, but written in the
aftermath of World War One, the tumult of the Easter Rising, the subsequent
Civil War in Ireland, is also about a time when the collapse of legitimate
authority or benign tyranny led to the purges, show trials and witch hunts that
typified authoritarian rule in Germany and Russia. Shaw expressed sympathy and support for both
Stalinist and Nazi methods and therefore his attitude towards Joan is hardly
straightforward. Although he illustrates
this story of the individual contesting monolithic institutions like feudalism
and the papacy with constant humanist sympathy, his own authoritarian instincts
and interests lie ultimately with those institutions and not with Joan. Essentially Joan, for Shaw, is a symbol of
the chaos, madness and disorder of alterity and otherness, predicated upon the
feminine, which Shaw must consider and dispose of.
Paul Murphy, Belfast,
September 22nd 2016
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