Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw
A re-imagined production, directed by Imara Savage with additional text by Imara Savage and Emme Hoy. Set designer David Fleischer. Costume designer Renee Mulder. Lighting designer Nick Schlieper. Composer and sound designer Max Lyandver. Assistant director. Clemence Williams. Voice and text coach Charmian Gradwell. Sydney Theatre Company. Roslyn Packer Theatre. June 11 – 30 2018
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
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| Sarah Snook as Saint Joan |
The sign in the foyer of the Roslyn Packer Theatre gave the running time of the Sydney Theatre Company production of St Joan as one hour and thirty five minutes with no interval. It was instantly obvious that this was not George Bernard Shaw’s original play. That ran for over three hours with Sybil Thorndike in the title role in 1925.
Instead, the audience was to be
presented in director Imara Savage’s
production with a version that stripped away much of the original text,
included monologues written with emerging STC Writer in residence Emme Hoy and that
focused on the character of Joan, played by Sarah Snook. The result is a
production of such power, such relevance and such emotional impact that it
speaks to our age with startling immediacy. Savage’s passionate embrace of the
themes of instinctive faith versus the
institutional dictums of the church and its dogma, the dominant male power of
the state and the oppression of women screams out for reason from her programme
introduction.
What emerges is an expressionist
re-imagining of Shaw's play. The
curtain rises on a bare stage with a lone figure in armour in a spotlight. Enter,
all dressed in black, an English priest (Seamus O’Shea), a French Earl (David
Whitney), a Prosecutor (Socratis Otto)
and a French Bishop (William Zappa) to debate the fate of the captured country girl prior to her trial. The priest, clothed
in British superciliousness cries for the stake. The Bishop strives for
redemption from the curse of heresy. At the centre of this debate is the
proposed fate of teenage Joan, the fighter, the dreamer, the agitator, the
faith bringer and the agent for change- the daughter of her God! Her innocence,
her fervour, her wiles may break the siege of Orleans in her battle to end a
Hundred Years War, but it cannot break the power of men, threatened and
intimidated by a girl from the farm who hears the voices of Archangel Michael
and the martyred Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret. The debate is defined by
the surgical precision of conflicting ideals and ambitions. Savage and her brilliant
creative team construct a Brechtian arena of argument for an audience to judge.
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| Socratis Otto, Brandon McLelland and William Zappa |
In order to achieve this, Savage
has thrust the character of Joan into the centre of the action, surrounded by
her accusers and inquisitors against whom she is compelled to raill in a life
and death battle for faith and reason. This reaches a climax in the final
scene, when a distraught Joan is barraged with accusation and enticement by her
male accusers directly hurling their charges and pleas for renouncement to the
audience. The assault is merciless, the tension excruciating and the injustice
heart rending. On an open stage, Joan is
cruelly exposed, a victim of the inquisitor, played with the steely assurance
of irreversible reason by John Gaden, and with faith betrayed and hope abandoned.
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| Gareth Davies. Socratis Otto, Anthony Taufa |
Throughout, flashbacks reveal the
key events that map out the journey from the thirteen year old’s conversations
with Archangel MIchael to the seventeen
year old’s persuasive convincing of the
Archbishop, also played by John Gaden, the weak Dauphin (Gareth Davies) and the
General at Orleans (Brandon McClelland). A superb cast embraces the forceful
purpose of this production. It explodes with conflict, argument and debate. War
is waged. It is the fierce battle of ideas, of faith, of gender, of power, of
territory and of minds, muzzled in a mire of obsession.
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| Brendon McClelland and Sarah Snook |
Savage’s production references
Shaw’s play, written at the time of Irish conflict with the English over
occupation, shortly after the end of the Great War and within a couple of years
of Pope Benedikt’s canonization of Joan and more than four hundred years after
Joan is declared innocent by Pope Calixtus lll. Today, St Joan appears as
relevant as ever. The Joan of Arcs of
our time appear throughout the world to cry out Bernard Shaw’s reformist
ideals. Emma Gonzales is the St Joan of the teenage uprising against school
shootings. Malala Yousafzi is the St. Joan in her campaign against the Taliban
and their oppressive prohibition of education. And Pussy Riot’s punk outcry
against the Russian oligarchy dared to decry a regime bent on its unassailable
supremacy.
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| Sarah Snook as the condemned Saint Joan. |
At the very epicentre of this
stirring and thought-provoking cry for reason and action is Snook’s
charismatic, magnetizing and luminescent performance. Snook’s St Joan appears as a role model for a
new age. Snook is magnificent, capturing the religious fervour and naivety of
the young teenager, the deep rooted belief in her mission of the seventeen year
old and the fear and vulnerability of a woman, defiled , derided and doomed by powerful,
ignorant men.
I leave the theatre moved by the
plight of the patriot, outraged by the injustice of blind obstruction, and hopeful
that the power of Bernard Shaw’s language, the sharpness of his acerbic wit
and the wisdom of his plea to the world will echo in the directness, the drama
and the power of this production.
