The opening of Marianne Elliott’s revival of Saint Joan will fill anyone familiar with the nuthouse excesses of modern auteur-directors with awful foreboding. Why are men in what seem to be Maoist suits advancing in slow motion from the stunted trees at the back of the stage towards the pile of chairs on the wooden platform at its centre? Why are they picking up those chairs, noisily banging them down, and preparing to watch the play while seated on each side of that platform? Are we about to get the Little Red Book version of Shaw’s salute to Joan of Arc?
Well, no. I’m not sure that yet more fierce chair-biffing is the best way to evoke a battle that Shaw anyway didn’t ask to occur onstage or that the glueing of medieval breastplates to contemporary vests is a particularly subtle way of signalling that 15th-century events have something to teach us now. Yet Elliott’s production has the pace, energy and articulacy that the play needs. And in Anne-Marie Duff it has a striking heroine.
The first thing one notices is how small, how slight, how un-Amazonian she is. One could almost as soon imagine Tinkerbell storming forts at Orl?ans. Yet Duff has the qualities that matter, some even more than Shaw required. He thought Joan’s “miracles” a blend of intuition, chance and luck; yet, when Duff speaks in her Ulster-like accent of God or the saintly voices that impel her, something rapt, intense and (yes) spiritual overwhelms that pale, pinched face. More than any Joan I’ve seen, she’s what James Hayes’s sadly cynical old archbishop tells her: “In love with religion.”
Maybe she’s less effective when it’s time for her to display hubris and imperious vanity; but at the trial scene her built-in vulnerability becomes a plus. Once again she’s the village girl who can’t comprehend the cant of the black-clad men who surround that platform, hemming her in with priestly testosterone. She’s ashen, terrified, distraught, broken enough to let her head fall on to the monk who is helping her to sign her confession — and yet you believe it when her faith reasserts itself and, in words that have been criticised by some as sentimental, she retracts and goes to the flames.
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Should we actually see her in her death throes on chairs that have been rearranged to represent the stake? Well, all I can say is that Duff’s performance moved me, though not so much as to lessen the play’s intellectual impact. Thanks also to the collective talents of Angus Wright, Christopher Colquhoun, Paul Ready as a comically feeble Dauphin and Oliver Ford Davies as an incongruously considerate Inquisitor, you can’t miss Shaw’s arguments.
For him, Joan was a saint because her instinctive, commonsense attitudes to everything from feudalism to religious conscience to warfare to gender to dress challenged the status quo. She was Shaw in 15th-century armour — but, at the National, also sympathetic enough to stir a 21st-century soul.
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