Saint Joan
Adapted by Ruthie Black from George Bernard Shaw
Arches Lane Theatre
Star rating: 3
George Bernard Shaw’s 1923 play runs for over three intensive hours with six scenes and an epilogue. Ruthie Black, who also plays the titular Joan, has pared it down to 70 minutes. Either way it’s heavily discursive material which asks a lot of questions and, quite deliberately, doesn’t answer them.
Joan – Jeanne d’Arc – was an illiterate peasant girl who successfully led French armies against the English in the early 15th century, driven, she always claimed, by the voices of saints and angels in her head. Burned at the stake in Rouen for heresy aged only 19, she became a cult figure soon after her death and was eventually canonised by the Catholic Church in 1920 – an event which was part of the inspiration for Shaw’s play.
Black’s two-hander version sets it in a bleak interrogation room (the same sort of institutional chairs that the audience is seated on) and stresses the timelessness of the narrative with an (over long) agonised jazz song at the beginning, motor cycle leathers and at one point a Facetime time interview on phones. Fair enough. We are, after all, still debating the extent to which religion drives power struggles and wondering whether war is ever justified even if you are unshakeably convinced that some version of “God” is on your side. There’s even an anti-capital punishment discussion sewn into this. Joan was executed in the worst possible way – on the same day as the trial at which she was pre-judged and predictably rejected life imprisonment as an alternative. Twenty years later there was another trial at which her name was cleared – a pretty strong argument against punishment by death.
Black – her magnificent cornrows emphasising Joan’s strength and individuality – is a richly charismatic performer. Her face speaks eloquently as she listens to what’s being said to, and about, her especially during the recantation which comes in the epilogue. She does fear and anger very well – at one moment every inch the determined. dignified leader and the next a terrified teenager.
James Saxby plays everyone one else including the inquisitor, Joan’s ally Jack and the Dauphin of France who has become King Charles the Victorious by the epilogue. Saxby makes the changes unfussily and almost entirely by voice but it works pretty effectively.
Even at 70 minutes, it’s a dense and wordy piece but director Peter Hinto-Davis incorporates a fair amount interesting movement round the space including the occasional use of the centre aisle so that it never feels too static.
