SAINT JOAN
Sara Topham stars as Joan of Arc at the Shaw Festival,
Saint Joan
(out of 4) By George Bernard Shaw, directed by Tim Carroll. Through Oct. 5 at the Shaw Festival Theatre, 10 Queen’s Parade, Niagara-on-the-Lake. Shawfest.com or 1-800-511-7429.
Clarity.
This is the supreme virtue of Tim Carroll’s debut production as artistic director of the Shaw Festival.
Immediately, Judith Bowden’s scenic design establishes the production’s emphasis on immaculate lines and spareness. It combines inspiration from the designs of modernist masters Edward Gordon Craig and Josef Svoboda, and from the way in which some contemporary visual artists use light in their work.
The action is played on a tilted, square, black plinth, on which sits a white cube glowing from within. A thin beam also shining with white light hangs vertically on the other side of the stage. In this and throughout, Bowden’s sets work in harmony with Kevin Lamotte’s lighting.
The cube lifts at various points to reveal the acting company underneath, and is involved in numerous other dramatic “how did they do that?” staging moments — a reference, perhaps, to the themes of magic and sorcery (or are they miracles?) at the centre of the play.
Panels that slide open to reveal the cast in the guise of court scribes and a back wall that flips over to become a mirrored surface are some of the many striking scenographic moments.
Contrasting with this combination of modern and contemporary design references is the 16-member company’s excellent choral singing of sacred music composed and directed by Claudio Vena — not a huge amount of it, but enough to further set the religious context.
First produced in 1923, the play takes as its basis the familiar story of Joan of Arc — a teenage farm girl in the15th century (played here by Sara Topham) who believed that the voices of saints and archangels were guiding her to drive the English out of France.
The play’s final line, spoken by the title character: “How long, oh Lord, how long?” was invoked satirically in the 1920s as a critique of its duration — played in full, it runs more than four hours. As with most contemporary productions, there are now cuts to the script and the production runs two hours and 45 minutes (with one interval).
The cuts here strip away some historical and military material, focusing the story on different interpretations of Joan’s visions and leadership, and the challenges they pose to the societal status quo.
They also block most of the poten- tial sentimentalization of Joan’s character as a romantic, tragic heroine. She is presented as someone whose unequivocal convictions pit her against more complex or weaker souls — all men — and thus render her an impossibly threatening figure.
Carroll was drawn to the Shaw Festival, he says in interviews, to work on an ongoing basis with an ensemble of actors on an approach to texts that is playful, responsive and spontaneous.
We see that project launching here, in the cast’s impressive level of comprehension of the script and attentiveness to each other onstage. What’s spoken comes across as real conversations rather than the recitation of lines.
Even given all this, though, there are wordy passages of argument — particularly in the second half of the first act — that are likely to test audience members’ patience.
One of the most challenging scenes, in which the English nobleman War- wick and various French clergymen debate (and debate . . .) the source of Joan’s success and what’s to be done about it, is lifted here by a marvellous performance by Tom McCamus as Warwick.
McCamus takes the audience on the full journey of his character’s wily assessment of a scenario and lets us marvel at and be horrified by how skilfully he turns it to his advantage, with the simple and chilling statement: “We must burn the woman.”
Most of the other performances currently lack McCamus’s level of depth and nuance, but this also feels like a production with the potential to ripen significantly over its remaining five months in the Shaw’s repertory season.
A key effect of the cuts is to make this more of an ensemble piece than a star vehicle, but the play nonetheless spins around Joan, and it seems that Topham is still finding her full place in the character. She communicates single-minded conviction but as yet does not fully convince as someone with the argumentative and personal power to turn so many others to her point of view.
There is also a surprising lack of chemistry between her Joan and Gray Powell’s Dunois; a relationship with the potential to hold considerable emotive charge that has yet to blossom.
Great plays resonate differently in different times, and it’s interesting to note that when the Shaw Festival first staged Saint Joan in 1981, director Christopher Newton staged its epilogue only grudgingly, when the Shaw estate insisted on it.
Here, the epilogue comes across as the play’s richest material — an opportunity for the characters and the audience to reflect on the effects of Joan’s life and death, involving any number of ironic insights and more than a few wry laughs.
It’s a deeply satisfying end to a solid production on its way, perhaps, to being a truly inspired one.