Saint Joan

by Bernard Shaw

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 15 February 2017

Josie Rourke directs Gemma Arterton as Joan, Fisayo Akinade as the Dauphin, Richard Cant as Poulegny and de Stogumber, Hadley Fraser as Dunois, Jo Stone-Fewings as Warwick, Niall Buggy as the Archbishop, Rory Keenan as the Inquisitor and Elliot Levey as Cauchon in a production designed by Robert Jones.

Shaw's play, written in 1923, not long after Joan was canonised in 1920, uses material gleaned from historical sources close to the events of Joan's life and trials to present a strong-willed and forceful woman undone by the political realities of her time - a picture also of his general vision of the individual struggling to assert the best of humanity against often overwhelming odds.

Contrasts abound - Joan is the only woman on stage; she claims an unshakeable belief that her 'voices' tell her what is right, while the men around her are mired in political calculation or demoralised ennui. Some she can inspire to action, but the spell does not always last as even the soldiers whom she leads to victory eventually choose to abandon her in favour of prudential considerations.

The contrast is underscored in this production by having Joan dressed in plain medieval soldier's garb while all the men around her are in modern dress - mainly slick business suits, though the Archbishop can sport full episcopal purple, while the campily petulant Dauphin is initially seen in unkempt pajamas. The backdrop veers between projections of gorgeous medieval illustrations and excerpts from news broadcasts and current affairs programs purporting to reflect the political and economic situation as it might be reported today. The effect can be disconcerting - it takes a while to realise that the stock market reactions to an egg crisis refer not to something like the salmonella scandal of the early 1990s, but to the apparent refusal of hens to lay eggs at all until Joan gets her way. But it also jolts us into realising that much of what we see is all too relevant. The bluff English outrage that anyone should question their behaviour in and attitudes towards Europe is a case in point.

The men are always congregating around a long table - conference table, military command post, courthouse bar - which sits on a revolve slowly turning. We are watching the world of men spinning inexorably even as the players involved imagine that they are in control of what they are doing. The thugs, the bullies, the self-righteous and the self-pitying are all there, presented by an excellent cast.

Shaw being Shaw, he cannot resist lecturing and musing, allowing two of his characters to invent the words 'protestantism' and 'nationalism' well before their time; but how refreshing nonetheless to witness a play neither afraid of expounding ideas nor of presenting violently opposed views of truth and authority with equal passion. The scene in which Warwick and Couchon plot Joan's downfall is chilling, and while de Stogumber's violent patriotism may look almost like comic relief, its strength cannot be denied, even as it is patronisingly fobbed off by the more experienced political operators. 

It is of course in the trial scene that the opposites are most starkly presented. Joan's self-assurance is almost crushed by the weight of all that is arrayed against her. Gemma Arterton has presented us with an articulate and attractive picture of Joan, sure of her aims, happy in the companionship of the military life but with a disarmingly wry and warm smile for the follies and foibles of the men around her. But when the whole panoply of the ecclesiastical and secular arms are against her she momentarily succumbs and allows her hand to be guided to sign a recantation. Only the prospect of perpetual imprisonment leads to her greet speech of independence as she tears up the document in scorn; it is comparable to John Proctor's final assertion of himself in The Crucible and delivered here with incandescent power.

The long epilogue in which the newly sanctified Joan calls up the ghosts of her associates and enemies and proposes to return to life in modern (1920s) times is here truncated to contain only her interaction with the fanatic de Stogumber, now reduced to being a regretful and powerless parish priest - but her final plea remains an unsettling question.