Yes, non-binary Joan is woke – but it’s actually harmless fun
I, Joan (Shakespeare’s Globe) Verdict: Identity theft ★★★II Silence (Donmar Warehouse) ★★★II
Verdict: Memorial to Indian Partition
THIS was the show that was meant to set us all growling like guard dogs. Feminists — including Sarah Vine in these pages — feared the forces of non- binary darkness had hijacked a female icon, in the shape of Joan of Arc . . . and might never give her back.
The theatre, too, on its flawlessly woke website, had drawn its wagons into a circle, with pompous self-justification and a blizzard of personal pronous (she/ her, they/them etc).
In the event, I, Joan, a play by Charlie Josephine (they/he), is mostly innocuous, childlike fun. The massacre of pronouns may wreak havoc with our grammar, but it is unlikely to bring down civilisation.
Besides, Joan has a long history of being co-opted. By the French. By the Catholic Church. And by crusading women. The LGBTQetc brigade won’t keep her for long.
Three things we know of Joan for sure: she was born female, fought the English and was burnt at the stake for wearing men’s clothes. The rest is speculation, and Josephine’s play is giddy with such conjecture.
Historical reality is swiftly defenestrated in a coarsely satirical, modern dress drama. Instead of leading peasants against the English, this Joan raises a ‘queer’ New Model Army of identity puritans dressed in non-binary uniforms
(dungarees, string vests, DMs).
JOSEPHINE
is, moreover, careful to keep women onside, with Joan declaring ‘girls are great, girls are brilliant, there is nothing wrong with being a girl’. phew, glad we cleared that one up, ladies.
So, you guessed it, it’s men ( aka ‘entitled’ pedlars of ‘patriarchy’ and perpetrators of the ‘male gaze’) who are likely to find this most tedious.
Yet there’s a chance of enjoying it if you don’t have a dog in the fight. Isobel Thom (they/them), in the title role, is fresh out of drama school and gives us a Joan who is an excitable creature, called to battle by the voice of a private God.
But following military success she accuses the Queen of selling out to patriarchy and insists on wearing men’s clothing — allowing the writer to claim ‘the Maid of orleans’, as Joan was once known, as a trans martyr.
The three-hour show tries to get serious after a cartoonish first half, and there’s a fair bit of schoolgirlish proselytising.
Yes, it’s meant to provoke, but for the most part it’s just good, old- fashioned, light- hearted, pseudo-seditious agit-prop, using Joan as a political clotheshorse for ‘ trans- historical’ wish fulfilment. personally I see no reason why we can’t all carry on sharing Joan — as we have done these past 600 years.
ALSo commemorating allegedly marginalised voices is Silence — a memorial to victims of Indian partition in 1947. This was the inept compromise that led to the creation of pakistan and India and to a horror show of rape, murder and mass migration.
Weirdly though, this collection of testimonies to that horror (adapted from kavita puri’s book partition Voices), is both shocking and peculiarly pleased with itself. This is thanks largely to the surrogate of puri’s character, played by Nimmi Harasgama. She records experiences of those who saw India and pakistan descend into an orgy of sectarian violence.
What isn’t clear is if it’s an indictment of British rule, religious zealotry or the barbarism of humanity in general.