Saint Joan

Saint Joan runs at the Genesian Theatre from November 3 - December 1 2012. By George Bernard Shaw, directed by Kevin Jackson.

 

The story of Joan of Arc, Maid of Orleans, is an iconic one. A peasant girl with no knowledge of war of military strategy, she starts hearing the voices of saints in her mind and, following their advice, becomes the commander of the armies of France. After several successful campaigns, she is captured by the English, and after being tortured, she is burned at the stake as a witch and a heretic, her legacy not being recognised until her canonisation in the 1920s. It is an incredibly interesting story. A peasant virgin rising to become a major military commander in fifteenth century France? How is that not fascinating? Unfortunately, George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan hones in on some of the least interesting parts of the Joan story. Genesian Theatre’s production of Shaw’s play is a solid one, and there are lots of things to like about it – not least the robust performance of Sabryna Te’o as Joan – but there is no escaping the wordiness of Shaw. The story of Joan is drowned in a sea of ponderous verbiage.

Anyone who has read any feminist theory will be familiar with the phrase “the personal is the political.” Saint Joan focuses very much on the political and not the personal, and this is to its detriment. It is about politicians, not people. Joan the person is the interesting part of the Joan of Arc story, this totally disenfranchised peasant girl who becomes a political figure, believing she is destined to lead armies and win back France for God. Joan is the lens through which the story becomes extraordinary. By focusing on the broader political interactions, this is nullified. A Joan of Arc story should be about Joan. Bernard Shaw’s play is not. Joan is in it, sure, but we view her at a distance. (Saint Joan does not pass the Bechdel test: it cannot, because Joan is the only female character. The entire play is either a group of men talking about Joan or Joan arguing with a group of men. It’s kind of a sausage fest.)

Saint Joan is famously a play without a villain: every character has clear motivations for their actions and ultimately believes they are doing the right thing, even when the things they are doing are heinous. The problem is that there are so many characters that they eventually blend into one big soldier/clergyman/Frenchman/Englishman conglomerate mass that you could label “dude that is anti-Joan”. I certainly lost track of them after a while, and I’m relatively familiar with the Joan of Arc story. I shudder to think what someone new to the story would have thought.

The play is, of course, a classic, and it’s probably heresy to say that I don’t like it much. But I don’t, so call me heretic. The political intrigue of the whole thing might be interesting to some, but seeing a bunch of dudes arguing about Joan? I don’t care. Show me Joan. Show me what she’s thinking. Show her to me when she’s alone, just her and her voices. Show her to me when she’s commanding men rather than arguing with them. Sabryna Te’o did a great job as Joan in this production. I was always excited when she came on stage. Her Joan was brave and bold, occasionally vulnerable, but always noble. Her rendition of Joan’s famous speech about preferring to die to being locked up was heartfelt and totally lovely. She’s a wonderfully vibrant performer and I hope to see her on stage again soon. Unfortunately for Te’o and for the audience, Bernard Shaw has left out and/or glossed over the most interesting parts of Joan’s story: her experience of voices from heaven, finding a divine sword beyond a church altar, her role as a soldier. This isn’t a story about Joan – it’s a story with Joan in it. Unfortunately, the people around Joan are really not that interesting, and trying to sustain interest in them for three hours? It’s an ask.

To be honest, I’m not sure if it is really possible for me to ever really enjoy a production of Saint Joan. I’m not a Shavian. I’m just not. His tendency to show people talking about things ad nauseam rather than doing them just doesn’t do it for me. (Here’s my review of STC’s Pygmalion from earlier this year: I’ve been a heretic for a while.) There are some really good performances from the Peter Brook-esque colourblind cast of the Genesian production of Saint Joan. If you like Bernard Shaw and like this play, you’ll probably like this production of it: Kevin Jackson is a very skilled director, and it shows. Considering how wordy it is, it is a taut production, and Jackson draws strong performances from his cast. It’s well designed and well lit and very visually appealing. But personally, I think that if you want a Joan of Arc story, you can probably do better than Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. If you want to know about Joan of Arc the person, rather than the political machinations of those around her? Go elsewhere.

Pygmalion

Pygmalion runs at the Sydney Theatre in Walsh Bay until 3 March 2012. By George Bernard Shaw, directed by Peter Evans.

Pygmalion is a classic play – and like many classic plays, it comes with a lot of baggage. I don’t think a huge amount of people are familiar with the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea that lies behind it, but they are certainly familiar with the concept of the makeover genre (if they’ve ever seen, I don’t know, any reality TV, ever.) But the cultural baggage of Pygmalion is less to do with this thematic concern and more to do with hats and frocks and I could have danced all night-ing. You say Eliza Doolittle and ‘enry ‘iggins? People think My Fair Lady. They think Ascot. They think rags-to-riches, Cockney-to-RP, and most of all, they think about the hats and the frocks.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people come away from STC’s Pygmalion disappointed. There are no hats and frocks, no lovely sets, none of the trappings of what we think of as the ‘traditional’ Pygmalion. The stage at the Sydney Theatre is massive and stark. There is not a lot of set – a dressing table right down the back, where Andrea Demetriades as Eliza undergoes her transformations, a few machines to make Henry Higgins’s (Marco Chiappi) lab look all science-y. The show is played in modern dress, with nary a hat or a petticoat to be seen (though the dress that Demetriades wears in the tea-with-the-Eynsford-Hills scene is really, really gorgeous, and I want it).

So, as I said, I would not be surprised if a lot of people feel disappointed because this is not what they expected. I’m not one of them. The real insidious message of Pygmalion – the fact that Henry Higgins has actually attempted to create a sort of human sculpture, much like Evelyn does in Neil Labute’s The Shape of Things – is often concealed in the hats and the frocks and I really appreciated the attempt to strip it back.

But did it work? I’m not so sure that it did.

I feel like if the first scene had worked a little better, maybe I would have got into the stark staging and the vague modernisation more. As it was, the decision to play that scene just with Eliza onstage for most of it, with the rest of the cast members delivering their lines from the side, was strange and puzzling. Demetriades was a wonderful Eliza and she can certainly command the stage by herself, but this staging was... weird. I spent more time working out what that was meant to achieve than paying attention to what was going on, and that was, I feel, detrimental to my appreciation of the whole play.

Also – this is probably heretical to say, given that Pygmalion is such a classic, but I’m going to go there anyway – one of the major flaws of the script itself is that the fifth act, where Eliza and Higgins have a big argument and eventually she tells him that she is going to marry Freddy, is not really very interesting. It’s a rehash of the far more compelling argument they’ve had in the last scene – Eliza is frustrated, Higgins is frustratingly paternalistic, six of one, half a dozen of the other. It’s the point of the play where subtext really does become text, and I feel that something special has to be done with it to really make it interesting. This production doesn’t really do that. They do do some stuff with the video screen, going backstage to encounter Demetriades in her dressing room, but the ending of the play felt really laboured.

And on a personal note – extreme bias here, so be warned – the way that this production sidelines the Eynsford Hills made me really sad. I played Clara a few years ago, and she can be a really rich and interesting character – if you read Shaw’s epilogue to the play, about half of it is about what happens to her. I wasn’t sure why Harriet Dyer played her as so weepy during the tea party scene – it didn’t really make sense to me – but I think my major concern here dates back to the first scene again, where a lot of characterisation was sacrificed to have Eliza alone on the stage. I think Tom Stokes’s Freddy really suffered from this: he was fantastic and I would have liked to have seen more of him. In Shaw’s script, there are some optional scenes – not necessary, but they certainly add colour. This includes the famous Eliza-and-the-bath scene, as well as one after the ball where she meets Freddy. This production doesn’t include any of them. The play certainly works without them, but I would have loved to see Stokes get a chance to play that little post-ball scene with Demetriades.

There are some great performances in this show – I particularly enjoyed the work of Tom Stokes (as I mentioned above), David Woods as Alfred Doolittle, and Deborah Kennedy as housekeeper Mrs Pearce. Andrea Demetriades is an excellent Eliza and while I might not have agreed 100% with all of the characterisation, I thought all the cast did a good job. I love the hats and the frocks as much as anyone, but I was glad to see STC try something different here. Unfortunately, I don’t think they really pull it off. It’s a solid production, but ultimately underwhelming.