THEATRE
ST JOAN ★★★★½
Sarah Snook as St Joan of Arc in the Sydney Theatre Company production of the George Bernard Shaw play.
Photo: Brett Boardman
Roslyn Packer Theatre, June 9
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
It builds to this, and when the moment comes it's heartbreaking. It happens during her trial, when Joan despairs of having been abandoned to the fire by her Voices, and confesses that they have deceived her. Here George Bernard Shaw's text (closely mirroring transcripts of the historical trial), although relatively restrained, gives a good enough actor all she needs to work with, and Sarah Snook is a more than good enough actor.
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The intensity is all but maintained for Joan's subsequent recantation, in what is the finest speech Shaw gives her, around which director Imara Savage has choreographed a Steven Berkoff-like chorus effect from the eight male actors.
That moment of perceived abandonment works so excruciatingly well – beyond Snook's riveting performance – thanks to the play's remodelled dramaturgy. Savage has not only chopped a three-hour piece down to 90 minutes (including mercifully expunging the Epilogue – against Shaw's explicit injunction in his preface), she has completely restructured it, even adding new text in conjunction with writer Emme Hoy. And St Joan, remember, is not just widely considered a 20th-century classic, it played a pre-eminent part in winning Shaw the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature. So Savage has committed a literary heresy to echo Joan's spiritual one, but whereas Joan was burned alive, Savage should be praised to the heavens.
Shaw could not only be a pedant and a bore (like many soaring intellects), he could also be a deeply flawed dramatist. In its pre-Savage state St Joan gags on some dialogue that is so clunky as to be almost unplayable (the quality improving markedly the more the playwright leant on the trial transcripts). But, worse than that, he wrote his own protagonist out of half the play, and as a sheer human phenomenon Jeanne d'Arc eclipses damned near anyone, from Jesus Christ to Donald Trump.
Savage's restructuring not only gives Joan back her own play, it does something with which Shaw never properly grappled, and that is to restore an appropriate primacy to Joan's Voices: the word of God she rapturously received via St Catherine, St Margaret and St Michael. By allowing us a greater feel for this rapture than Shaw provided, Savage infinitely deepens the moment when Joan denies them.
Snook catches the untamed bravado of a teenager fired with passion, in this case for a profoundly personalised version of Catholicism and for an intense aversion to a France in which she, her neighbours and forbears have been terrorised by marauding English soldiers for nigh on 100 years. Savage's restructure moves more of the discussion about Joan to the opening, so we are 15 minutes in before she speaks, and when she does Snook makes her instantly compelling. Gone is Shaw's caricatured lower-class dialect, leaving a Joan that is one-third rebel, one-third saint and one-third cocky, genius-infused pragmatist. Snook, at 30, shoehorns all this into a girl who is supposed to be 17-19 across the play's chronology, and makes her credible and – even more improbably – likeable!
Savage's Sydney Theatre Company production merges and doubles other roles, using a persuasive cast that includes John Gaden as both the Inquisitor and Archbishop, William Zappa as Bishop Cauchon, David Whitney as Warwick and de Baudricourt, and Gareth Davies as the Dauphin.
Renee Mulder's costumes imply rather than proclaim both character and context, and David Fleischer's minimalist design has a towering, pleated backdrop that seems to suggest the doings of humanity are puny in the eyes of some higher power – perhaps a mystified Shaw watching from the flies.
Until June 30.
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