ARTS Impatience of a saint
KENNETH HURREN
The theatre, which has been alarmingly preoccupied with juvenilia just lately, got back into long pants last week. To put it another way, a not badly served bit of caviar turned up among the diet of fish fingers when the Mermaid Theatre at Blackfriars put on a revival of Saint Joan. It was one of the late Bernard Shaw's mischievous notions (and one that rewarded him handsomely) that any idea or theory that had been accepted as true for two or three decades was probably false and should be questioned; so I daresay he would have appreciated the irony in the present ap- plication of this proposition to the estimation of his own works. Saint Joan has for so long been regarded as a masterpiece that, by Shaw's lights, the time is ripe for some waspish revisionism. To argue the point that the play is not at the summit of his achievement as a dramatist but, on the con- trary, marks the beginning of his decline would be voguish and provocative, and I wish I could give my heart to the caper.
Unfortunately, my opinion is un-Sha-_ N ianly dull. It is that Saint Joan still seems to me a masterpiece: distinguished as a well- organised piece of theatre, and rivetingly elo- quent as a discussion of society's ir- repressible instinct to crush the occasional genius who comes into collision with some of its cherished absurdities and tries to spread around a little rational enlightenment in the ingenuous conviction that society will be grateful for the correction. The preface to the play—compact, as always, of wit, wisdom, illuminating erudition and genial perversity—mentions Christ, Mohammed and Socrates as three such figures whose `strange superiority' to the beliefs and morality of their times was responsible for their martyrdom, and if Shaw was not altogether prepared to put Joan in quite that league, he does suggest that in her im- patience with pompous authority her case was fundamentally similar,. This may be merely impish hyperbole, to be taken no more seriously by sober historians than his contention that the Maid was every bit as sharp as Napoleon in military strategy, but the pursuit of the theme, in play as well as preface, unquestionably makes this Joan a more stimulating heroine than the simple peasant of legend, operating entirely on instructions from heavenly headquarters. It also, of course, exposes as so much apple- sauce Shaw's oft-quoted statement that the play made minimal demands upon his gifts as a dramatist since all he had done was `to put down the facts, to arrange Joan for the stage.'
Other writers had put down the same facts, and some, including Shakespeare, had scurrilously travestied them. It was Shaw's feat to deal with them with no more than ordinary dramatic licence and yet to make of Joan not only a figure credible to our spec- tacularly sceptical century -(her 'voices', a troublesome element, are reasonably at- tributed to a busy imagination a little in- fatuated with religion), but also a symbol of the individual in eternal conflict with authority—which just happened to be represented, in this case, by catholicism and feudalism. Even the play's latterday detractors con- cede the excellence of the trial scene, and there is no need to dwell on the unique cun- ning of it, whereby the eminent fairness of her judges makes the more terrible and 'melancholy the recklessness of the defendant and the inevitability of the verdict. What re- quires to be said rather more emphatically than is presently fashionable is that this dramatic peak is not exactly isolated on wasteland. I cannot think, for example, of any theatrical demonstration of simple faith more stirring than that in which Dunois is persuaded to subordinate himself and his armies to the girl from Domremy; nor of any stage discussion more brilliantly handled than the one in which Warwick, de Stogumber and Cauchon examine the political, national and ecclesiastical implica- tions of Joan's heresy; nor of any emotional upheaval in an individual more strikingly persuasive than that which afflicts the wretched de Stogumber when he has wit- nessed the burning he has so implacably ad- vocated.
It would be trifling with the truth to say that Bernard Miles's production wholly does justice to this masterly work. It is, nonetheless, palpably devoted to its cause and nowhere wilfully obscures its merits; and these honest virtues, that might once have been taken for granted, are worthy of remark in times when directors are notoriously impatient of familiar works by dead authors and tend to be larkishly con- cerned with capricious re-interpretations of their own. Sir Bernard resists any tempta- tions that may have been pressed upon him by the acclaim for aberrant Shakespearian items at Stratford-upon-Avon and, indeed, at his own riverside playhouse. His approach is straightforward, and only in aspects of Angela Pleasence's performance as the Maid is there a dubious suggestion of novel con- temporaneity.
Miss Pleasence has clearly given the character a psychiatric examination, and has elected to combine the chauvinism, the militarism and the holy radiance in some blithe form of paranoia. She could probably turn out a lively thesis on Joan's career seen from this angle, but as an actress her first concern should be with the character drawn by Shaw. Miss Pleasence's view, as it hap- pens, is not inconsistent with the text in the earlier stages of the play, and it gets her over the difficulty of seeming physically too fragile for the mediaeval battlefields, but it puts her on the rocks in the trial scene—where she quivers with pent-up hysteria, losing the pathos of innocent bewilderment—and must be disconcertingly abandoned altogether in the cheerful epilogue. -It's a valiant but essentially misconceived performance. The supporting players offer decently journeyman portrayals—perhaps rather less than that in the case of John Tordoff's music hall turn as the Dauphin, but compensatingly rather more in the case of George Benson's gentle exercise of authority as the Inquisitor—and the greatness of the play is not lost.
Downstream at Greenwich, Jahn hale continues to grapple with themes of almost Shavian substance. If Spit head can be loosely described as his Saint Joan, and Its All in the Mind as his Doctors' Dilemma. his new piece, Lorna and Ted, is his Village Wooing. With Rita Tushingham and Ray McAnally as the eponymous pair, it chronicles episodically the domestic rela- tionship of an ill-matched couple—a primly virginal nurse who answers a Housekeeper Wanted advertisement in the Lady, and the lusty, crusty East Anglian blacksmith who turns out to have inserted it and soon discloses that the chief requirement at the forge is for a brood mare rather than a workhorse. Lorna is not especially deterred by his blandishments and ultimately puts in some sturdy work on behalf of the women's liberation movement, turning her bemused Petruchio into an acquiescent Willie Mossop. The construction hints at a first conception as a play for the box, and what I take to be expansion work for the stage somewhat dissipates the impact, but it is all acceptably entertaining in its unpretentious way.
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