#285: JOAN—II.  Not the Joan of history, but Bernard Shaw’s.  Some years ago my circle of friends ran heavily to local amateur and semi-pro actors, who were always kicking around what roles they dreamt of playing.  One of them—one of the most gifted actors I’ve ever known personally—answered the question with a promptness that showed long forethought.  When she said she wanted to play Shaw’s Joan, I was surprised: she was not religious, lit no candles to the Catholic church, and had never shown any great interest in French history.  When I asked her why Joan, she got an expression of immense eagerness.  “Because I have no idea how I’d do it,” she said.

        It’s been a pleasure to run into Holly Hill’s book Playing Joan: Actresses on the Challenge of Shaw’s Saint Joan, which I probably first read a good forty years ago.  In it she interviews twenty-six actresses, from Elizabeth Bergner, who played it for Max Reinhardt in German in 1924, to Nora McLellan, who did it for the Canada Shaw Festival in 1981.  In between we go to Wendy Hiller, who played in the film versions of Pygmalion (listen to her accent work there) and Major Barbara, as well as in I Know Where I’m Going, one of the most charming films of the 1940s); to Siobhan McKenna, who translated Shaw’s play into Irish and played it both in Irish and in English; to Joan Plowright, who gives one of the most detailed and intelligent of analyses; Judi Dench, as thoughtful on Shaw as she is, in her recent book, on Shakespeare; and Eileen Atkins, who fought shy of the role for years and gives the most vivid account of the role’s uncanny knack for possessing the player.  Some actresses we may know from film or television: Janet Suzman, from the conniving (or is she?) wife in The Singing Detective, or Siân Phillips, of course, “the tarantula mother/empress Livia” (as IMDB so charmingly describes her) in I, Claudius; and others, English, Irish, American, Canadian, whose performances on stage were never recorded.  (Take a peek at Youtube and you can see Bergner’s performance, opposite Olivier, as Rosalind in the 1936 film of As You Like It.)

        One charm of the book is the lovely sense of stage tradition, and some of its supportive generosity: Hill was not able to interview Sybil Thorndyke, who originated the role under Shaw’s direction, but several of the actresses mention Thorndyke’s having seen their performances and praising them; she visited Joan Plowright and gave her a copy of the play inscribed to her by Shaw; Plowright says “I’ve got to hand it down.”  But what makes the book so arresting—as good a book on the theatre as I’ve ever read—is the variety of the experience of playing Joan the actresses express.  Just the choice of accents: Lancashire, West Country, Irish.  Atkins went for Glaswegian (“With Glaswegian you can get hold of a word and you can shove it.”) but had to give it up; she found it with a Midlands accent (“Their whole way of speaking has more attack.”) to avoid what she calls Mummerset, ersatz rural.  This opens out onto any scene, any speech; each actress finds a worry spot, a pair or wings, a realization—often well into the production.  Shaw’s Joan, so often seen as the only role for women that approaches what Hamlet gives male actors, is a huge physical challenge (Judi Dench says, “There’s a tremendous relief when they say, “Take her to the fire,” and you think “Oh, thank goodness.”) but a complexity, as with Juliet, often beyond younger performers.  Without a good supporting cast, you’re sunk: many of the actresses cite their fellow performers.  And there is, of course, the epilogue: “How long, O Lord, how long?”  Thinking of it, I’m reminded of what Sinead Cusack said of Pegeen Mike’s famous last line, “I’ve lost the only playboy of the western world.”  She was so terrified of it she was incapable of saying it in rehearsal, and only got it out when they filmed the scene.  Some players, some directors, want to cut the epilogue, but Barbara Jeffords quotes Thorndyke saying to her, “Saint Joan without the epilogue is like cutting the last scene of The Merchant of Venice. It’s as bad as that, like Henry Irving cutting everything after Shylock’s exit. It’s absolutely essential to the form of the play.”  Almost infinite variety, but one common factor: the joy, the respect, the awe almost, the affection that the play and the role incites in each of the players, stated most clearly by Nora McLellan in the last words in the book: “I could still be doing that play. I could easily do it for years. I thrill to everything about it.”  

       I’ve seen Joan done only once, a marvelous and memorable production at Trinity Rep in Providence, in 1999, directed by Amanda Dehnert, with Jennifer Mudge Tucker convincing and simply right as Joan, and the male roles shared out among five actors.  Dehnert had clearly understood Shaw’s injunction about playing for speed: the actors literally hit the boards running, and the acts were signaled not by church bells but by the bells you hear at the beginning of a round of boxing. They tore through it, and you could feel the audience (and yourself) holding on for dear life.  Driving home, the four of us excitedly talked the play out, but with those kind of pauses that mean everyone is still taking in what they’ve seen; the depth charges were still going off.  Lynn Redgrave, after finishing her run, said, “I was terribly relieved not to wake up to the role every day, and also felt as if I’d lost something.”  I think we’d all felt something strangely comparable, just from being in the audience.

      And yes, they kept the epilogue.  “I shall be remembered when men will have forgotten where Rouen stood.”  If the play has reached you at all, Joan’s last line will keep at you for a long time after; it’s a question we wait every day to hear answered.  “O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive thy saints?  How long, O Lord, how long?”  

---Playing Joan: Actresses on the Challenge of Shaw’s Saint Joan, Twenty Six Interviews by Holly Hill.  Theatre Communications Group, 1987.  1987 means it’s almost forty years old.  I doubt Saint Joan’s been put in a box and left in the basement.  Can someone do Playing Joan II?