(Gemma Arterton as Saint Joan. Courtesy of The
Telegraph)
Whatever the intellectual attractions of
the play, it is Arterton who shines brightest. (Review by Patrick Compton)
Josie Rourke’s updated version of George
Bernard Shaw’s acclaimed 1923 play, Saint
Joan, features a powerful, charming performance in the title role by Gemma
Arterton at the intimate Donmar Warehouse in London where a concentrated
audience, only four rows deep, observes the action on three sides of the stage.
The glamorous English actress, better known
to South African audiences for her roles in films such as Quantum of Solace, Tamara Drewe and Song for Marion, shows bags of determination, as well as spiritual
purity, in her role as the Maid of Orleans whose heroic military exploits
eventually ended in her tragic death at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431.
Rourke conceives the play as a clash
between the medieval Joan – dressed in period outfits – and duplicitous,
self-serving boardroom executives that you would find in London today. The
military and financial events that punctuate Joan’s familiar story are announced
by a newsreader on a large screen.
The intention is clearly to isolate Joan
and show that her spiritual purity is threatened at every turn by various kinds
of functionaries of the economic, religious, class and political status quos.
All this is very clever and helps us to
view the play’s themes in a modern light.
At the same time, however, Shaw, at his
best, is the kind of playwright who gives equal weight to both sides of the
argument and Rourke’s conception risks making the divide between Joan and her
detractors too simplistic.
The play has been described as “a tragedy
without villains” because all the players believe they are acting for what they
conceive of as the good. Joan, taking note of her spiritual voices, is the
classic outsider who threatens men who belong to powerful institutions. It is
this that is Shaw’s great theme, namely the conflict between the inspired
individual and the established order, and Rourke’s conception arguably
disguises rather than illuminates this.
But the play is certainly not sunk by this
mini-iceberg, if such it be. Shaw’s sparkling dialogue is entertaining,
informative and thought-provoking. The men in the boardroom – both English and
French – are all, in their different ways, threatened by Joan. The smooth Warwick
represents the English aristocracy which fears Joan’s French nationalism while
the churchmen are terrified that Joan’s personal relationship with God bypasses
(and therefore sidelines) the church, the Pope and religious authority in
general. The camp Dauphin, later to be crowned king by Joan herself, simply
wants her to “chill”, allowing the war to end and his easy life to continue. It
is, ultimately, in all their interests that Joan be condemned to death.
And while it is easy to sympathise with the
passionate Joan, particularly after she inspires the French army to lift the
siege of Orleans, it’s easy enough to see her religious fanaticism also carries
with it dangers to established secular society, a fact most obviously borne out
in modern times in the guise of Muslim militancy.
Whatever the intellectual attractions of
the play, it is Arterton who shines brightest. Her stellar performance combines
charm – she is tactile at times, innocently caressing her antagonists – and
humour as well as a fiercely held belief in her “voices”, her personal
relationship with God and her desire to drive the English out of France. The
force of her individual vision, it is plain to see, sits awkwardly with the
world in which she lives.
From this follows one of the play’s biggest
after-shocks. Towards the end one of the characters cries: “Must then a Christ
perish in torment in every age to save those who have no imagination?” It is
this notion of Joan-as-Christ, and the sinister prediction that great spiritual
people will always fall foul of humdrum, destructive humanity, that is perhaps
the most disturbing implication of this brilliant play.
Screenings at Cinema Nouveau, Gateway at
19h30 tonight (Saturday, March 18) and on Wednesday and Thursday, March 22 and
23. Also screening at 14h30 tomorrow (Sunday, March 19). – Patrick Compton
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