Saint Joan

Great bore or great masterpiece? The jury has been out on this one for decades, but Marianne Elliott’s exciting revival of Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan suggests something more troubling than either assertion: that Joan’s campaign of military action is the work of a fanatic driven by mysterious voices. The case against her is that she is a crazed terrorist who threatens a civilised way of life.

Elliott and designer Rae Smith take a “physical theatre” risk with a premonition of the sacrificial pyre right at the start. There is no smoke without choir, and the musicians are vocalising disaster (Jocelyn Pook’s score has an eerie, Celtic flavour of chants and bells) as actors unpick a pile of chairs in slow motion.

A council chamber is suggested immediately as the platform is raised on the great, slow-moving Olivier revolve against a background vista of blasted trees. As Dunois (Christopher Colqhhoun) delivers his lyrical “west wind” speech, the blue kingfisher is flown on a large pole manipulated by two puppeteers. The siege of Orleans is raised with the most tremendous banging on iron ramps, led by a palpably transported heroine careless of her own life, and the main platform ascends on a hydraulic pole to reveal bodies splayed like squashed flies.

Throughout, Anne-Marie Duff gives a literally bewitching performance as the teenage tearaway, a bride of Christ with a frightening self-confidence and a laser-like intelligence. She is blonde, quick, witty and Irish in accent, a peasant girl exchanging head scarves for armour with no change of pace. She avoids piety altogether, and doesn’t reserve her bountiful humanity only for her affectionate scenes with Paul Ready’s Dauphin, a stuttering incompetent rather than the usual dumb milksop.

At her trial, Joan is manacled, begrimed and hooded, and thrust before a microphone. She dies in exaltation, transfigured in bright light, a “misunderstood” zealot reaping celestial rewards.

Things get a bit bogged down with Oliver Ford Davies maundering drably on as the Inquisitor, but certain scenes have an edge and brightness even seasoned Joan-ites might have forgotten. The greatest of these is the meeting of de Stogumber (Michael Thomas), Warwick (Angus Wright) and Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais (Paterson Joseph), warning of the dangers when every girl becomes a Joan or a Mahomet, and religious and cultural differences lead to “a welter of war”.

Another conundrum posed by the play is the threat of nationalism to ecclesiastical command on the one hand and feudal tyranny on the other. It is a debate that this wonderfully alive production relaunches in a fresh and challenging way, mercifully at the only expense of truncating Shaw’s tedious dramatic epilogue, far less entertaining than his famous, still exhilarating preface.

- Michael Coveney