Exquisite Saint Joan lifts the spirit
Brilliant is such an overworked word. It’s lost its meaning.
So, what do you call a production that is acted with exquisite control and breathtaking imagination? What do you call a play directed with such total commitment it challenges your heart and mind at every turn? Revelatory, of course.
Shaw Festival’s riveting “Saint Joan” takes words we’ve heard before and lifts them from the page in such a new way they’re stimulating and fresh.
Watching director Tim Carroll’s vision here is like seeing the play for the first time. Exceptional directors can do that. They can take what is old and familiar and give it new life. They can take characters we think we know and release them in new ways. That, my friends, is when theatre lifts the spirit, quickens the pulse and makes you suddenly alive.
Shaw Festival’s triumphant production of “Saint Joan” sweeps away cobwebs. Still a powerful look at state and church and just how wicked they could be, it remains a fatal denunciation of cruelty battering innocence.
Despite those missing cobwebs, “Saint Joan,” for all its feel of modernity, remains the story of a young woman and her angel voices. Believe in them or not. It doesn’t matter. The point is Joan does.
As you might expect with Shaw, words are at the heart of this play. Words that enliven, challenge and move; words that can horrify, too. Carroll makes every word count. He’s stripped away fussy sets and costumes that root things in a time and place. He’s freed the play from trappings, so his production is lean and spare. It’s the words that matter, and they’re clearer here than I’ve ever heard them before. Poetic simplicity seems to be his mantra.
Yet, this is always a highly theatrical vision of the play, blessed with stagecraft.
Judith Bowden’s design offers a geometric space, something like a marble chessboard, though never quite that obvious. Boxes bathed in designer Kevin Lamotte’s interior light sometimes enclose characters, revealing their shadows, suggesting conversations behind closed
doors. Lights ripple in sizzling strips or rise above the playing area to suddenly extinguish like some grid’s massive power failure.
Always, Carroll finds in Shaw’s populist heroine reverberations for today’s radical voices. Joan is a feminist like Eliza in “Pygmalion,” a young woman of intense bravery and passionate strength borrowed from her Lord above.
That brings us to Sara Topham’s towering performance as Joan. We root for her from the beginning. We grow in admiration. And oh how we understand her naïve and innocent ways, transformed by faith into something perfectly wondrous.
Topham’s scenes bristle with life. Her audience with Wade BogertO’Brien’s cunning Dauphin is touching. Her confrontation with those who would burn her body, but never manage to destroy her heart and soul, are mesmerizing. Topham, in fact, streaks above everything like some exquisite comet of light.
A strong supporting cast; the strongest on any Festival stage so far this summer, breathes fire into what is an uplifting production.
Benedict Campbell, as the Archbishop of Rheims, Jim Mezon as Joan’s Inquisitor, Tom McCamus as her ego-driven enemy Richard, Earl of Warwick. Gray Powell as Dunois. Steven Sutcliffe as Captain La Hire. Every actor helps create the tapestry of Shaw’s play.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York there is a picture by Jules Bastien-Lepage. It’s Joan in a ramshackle garden in thrall to her voices.
I know now, whenever I see that picture I’ll think of Sara’s Joan, and her wide-eyed joy at ultimate canonization in the epilogue of Shaw’s play.
Topham’s evocation of youth, innocence and breathless f aith is something you won’t forget. It burns brighter than any fire set by political and religious dogs ever could.
Gary Smith has written on theatre and dance for The Hamilton Spectator for more than 35 years.