Wednesday 30 August 2017

Shaw Festival 2017 # 2: How Long, O Lord?

Trying to define greatness in a playscript is a fraught effort, to put it mildly.  But I'll take a kick at the can anyway.  For me, the truly great play is one which can be staged in a wide variety of ways without doing any violence to the underlying meanings of the text.  That is, of course, in addition to the numerous directorial concepts which end up swearing at the text -- and the great play can survive even those and emerge with its reputation largely intact.  Also, the great play is one in which each production can find new points of emphasis that cause you to rethink the nature of the script every time you see it staged.

Judged by those standards, Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan is undeniably a great play.  And this season's production at the Shaw Festival, helmed by new Artistic Director Tim Carroll, definitely found new and different points to emphasize in the script, and unusual approaches to many of the characters.  Yet the truly powerful and vividly performed Saint Joan that I keep hoping to see eluded this cast and creative team, too.  How long, O Lord?  (For those not familiar, that is the final line of the play.)

The first and biggest challenge in staging Saint Joan is to avoid turning it into a historical pageant, safely and comfortably removed from the present day, in which characters take it in turns to "stand and deliver" their eloquent points of view.  It's an easy trap to fall into, particularly if the director can see no further than the play's historical roots, abetted by Shaw's sometimes all-too-wordy speeches.

To speak frankly, Saint Joan is a play which stretches to truly Shakespearean lengths.  For this production, clever surgery has detached the odd phrase, aside, diversion, or tag line, in many spots so that the script is brought down to a more manageable size without impairing any of its essential character or meaning. 

I understand that Tim Carroll's innovative approach to staging the play has provoked considerable comment (to put it politely).  Personally, I like it very much precisely because his staging doesn't distance us from the play, nor does it contradict the meaning of the play in distracting ways.

Indeed, Judith Bowden's black box set with mirrored rear wall and lighted white cubic forms ascending and descending in different scenes reminded me of nothing quite so much as the similar kind of scenic minimalism often seen in the National Ballet's recent productions of modern ballet works.

The characters are also costumed in more-or-less contemporary clothes of the simplest possible design, in neutral greys, browns, and blacks, which equally serve the function of taking our minds off costumes and bringing us back to what the characters are saying and doing rather than how gorgeous or spectacular they look.

With the first scene of the play, we quickly come face to face with Tim Carroll's principal directing style in this show.  Robert de Baudricourt, the commander of the castle at Vaucouleurs, appears in the first scene.  In Shaw's copious stage directions, and in every other production I've seen, he's a loud, angry, aggressive bully.  But Carroll and actor Allan Louis have taken a different approach.  This Robert de Baudricourt is a very self-contained man; his bullying is entirely verbal, never physical, and much more understated.

As a result, the whole first scene really hangs fire, being far too conversational and easygoing in tone to launch the epic journey on which we should be taken.  Only as we get near the end of the scene does Louis wind up to a sufficient pitch of temper to convince us that Robert's conversion to Joan's cause is at all surprising.

More unconventional character readings lie ahead.  La Tremouille, who normally would pose an actual physical threat in his bullying of the Dauphin in Scene 2, here becomes another cutting wordsmith -- and cutting is the right word for him as portrayed by Jonathan Tan.  In previous seasons, Tan has been typecast at the Shaw as a whole series of wildly hyperactive characters, in roles requiring him to speak at 100 syllables per second.  The disciplined vocal outrage and stone-cold scorn of his La Tremouille is a refreshing change of pace from him.

A similar new look has occurred with Wade Bogert O'Brien, who has been trapped year after year in the roles of the pleasant-but-vacuous young Englishman, often a younger member of a noble family, who can be found littering the stage in virtually every play produced in England between 1860 and 1950.  His assumption of the role of the Dauphin lies in a completely different and much more rewarding league altogether.  Where many actors play the Dauphin as a man of childish immaturity, sulking and whining all over the palace, O'Brien has had the insight to realize that this is how his courtiers view him, but does not have to be how we view him.  This Dauphin maintains an adult level of dignity even as his courtiers and the Archbishop rake him over the coals time and again.  A refreshing and very believable choice.

The suave and sophisticated man of the world appears in the guise of the Archbishop of Rheims, played by Benedict Campbell.  Dignity and grandeur so often seen in this character are here laid aside in favour of a persuasive, modulated voice and smooth manners.

The role of Dunois is a nasty trap for an actor.  The character is given a huge buildup by others as a charismatic man of war when he's not on stage, but gets only two short scenes to impress us with how well he can live up to the advance billing.  Gray Powell manages the role sufficiently, but makes less of an impression than one might hope.  Simply put, Joan acts him right off the stage.

To describe Tom McCamus as the Earl of Warwick, only the word "urbane" will do.  The polished irony of the man is brought more fully alive than in any other production I have seen.

In his two scenes, Karl Ang makes a very good Chaplain, a hard-line nationalist who sees everything in stark black and white, yet somehow never spills over into childish pouting.

The terror of the trial is aptly expressed by the cold face and voice of Graeme Somerville as the Bishop of Beauvais, while Jim Mezon's Inquisitor is unexpectedly and uncommonly friendly, cajoling Joan rather than threatening her.  Somerville played his character so quietly and coldly that his words kept disappearing under the threshold of audibility, a problem shared by no other character in the performance.

So far so good, but there will be no play at all without the right person in the central and title role.  As Saint Joan is an acknowledged masterpiece of theatre, so the role of Joan is a recognized testing ground for a leading actress.  In order for the play to work, she must create before our eyes and ears the young girl whose force of character could set the world on fire.

Even by the standards of the greats who have played the role before her, Sara Topham definitely takes the part into that territory.  Her energy, clarity of voice, and forceful assertive character are all there, right from the get-go.  Why, then, was I left at the final curtain with the deflated feeling that the play as a whole had slightly missed the mark?

In the end, Topham's strong and vivid performance is somewhat undercut by the relatively low-key staging of the first two scenes.  Like an ancient tragedy, this tale begins in medias res and has to hit the floor running.  I've come to the conclusion that Topham's Joan certainly was headed that way, but some of her scene partners were a bit too much of the casual stroller by comparison -- and kept pulling her back by their choice to play the scenes more quietly.  It's difficult for Joan to get fired up all the way when some of the obstacles she faces won't give her a tough argument!

It's a question of striking a better directorial balance between the refreshing "new look" which Tim Carroll has brought to the text of the play and the need for enough dramatic fire to carry us through those first two scenes.

But having said that, I feel that this is a Saint Joan that is well worth seeing for its many fine qualities.  The mythical "perfect performance" still lies somewhere ahead of our time, but this production has landed in the ball park, and the uncommon clarity of the performances across the board stand the play in good stead.

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