Saint Joan in the Olivier Theatre is like this year’s Wimbledon. The players trudge around a big rectangle in the middle of a vast auditorium with no real idea of when they might get on with what they are there to do. Sometimes they get very excited and shout at each other. The English naturally get routed early on. The whole thing is permanently swathed in lowering clouds and a grim determination to see it through is required on the part of the audience.
George Bernard Shaw’s play about France’s talismanic Maid of Orleans, the scourge of the English armies during the hundred years war, (a conflict only marginally longer than the current production) is not often staged. The task fell to Marianne Elliott – Saint Joan is her first full-scale production as an Associate Director of the National.
Elliott has opted to make the play an ensemble piece and, for much of the performance, members of the company surround a revolving raised platform where the action – or lack of it – takes place. There are several spurious musical interludes and a frankly embarrassing ‘chair routine’ in place of a battle scene.
The play has suddenly become even more topical than its producers intended in a week that has seen the British suffer once more at the hands of religious believers. Elliott resists the temptation to visit the conflict in the Middle East although there is a nod to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay when a hooded, shackled Joan of Arc (a spirited performance in a difficult role by Anne Marie Duff) is dragged before the Inquisition prior to her being burnt at the stake.
There are some strawberries and cream moments. Paul Ready’s petulant Dauphin gives welcome comic relief and Angus Wright is a wonderfully louche Earl of Warwick whose Machiavellian discussions with the Bishop of Beauvais (a muscular performance from Paterson Joseph) over Joan’s fate are chilling to watch. It is a backhanded compliment to say that a debate on the death throes of the feudal system and the arrival of nation states is one of the highpoints but it is. During the trial scene towards the end, the humour teased out of a running joke about the theft of the Bishop’s horse being heresy, sets off the genuine horror of a simple country girl being burnt alive – and we find out what all the chairs and clouds of smoke were in aid of.
At 3 hours and 10 minutes until matchpoint, it is a gruelling 5 setter.
Saint Joan runs until 4 September 2007. See the video trailer for the play here:
