Saint Joan (Olivier, National Theatre)
As George Bernard Shaw approaches the end of copyright, directors will hopefully approach his work with a renewed vigour and less reverence. Having seen a couple of museum pieces at the Shaw Festival in Canada a few years back, I approached the three hours of Saint Joan, his 1923 work, somewhat circumspectly.
I was well rewarded. Although the production was competent with Paul Ready (The Dauphin), Angus Wright (Warwick), Oliver Ford Davies (Inquisitor) turning in solid performances, it was the play itself that did the trick.
It tells the story of the brief and brutally ended life of Joan of Arc. Caught up in the machinations of the Hundred Years War, she was burned at the stake shortly after turning 19, as thanks for leading the French in victories. Twenty-five years later, in 1456, she was declared innocent. Ironically, the court that produced this just verdict was entirely corrupt, while the court that had sent her for burning was conducted with the far more sly hypocrisy of church dogma and Christian superstitions. In 1920 she was canonised a saint.
The gamine Anne-Marie Duff (of TV series Shameless fame and the film The Magdalene Sisters) plays the feisty peasant girl employing a broad Irish accent. It’s a sprightly performance, though I admit that towards the end, I was not sufficiently taken with her portrayal to wish for a delay or be heartbroken by her burning.
Shaw’s subtle arguments and his extraordinary command of the language – there are only a handful of practicing playwrights that approach his authority over English – is a rare treat.
Philistines (Lyttelton, National Theatre)
This new version by Andrew Upton of Maxim Gorky’s first play Philistines (1902) is beautifully staged by the National Theatre’s Associate Director, Howard Davies. Its naturalism caused riots in the theatre when it was first performed (Stanislavsky directed).
Set in a bourgeois home in the first years of the 20th century, this revolutionary work prefigures the cataclysmic societal upheavals that would sweep Russia. It’s worth remembering that the revolutionary Gorky, a friend of Lenin’s, and denounced and imprisoned by Tsar Nicholas II, was not much later to have his plays closed and banned by Lenin.
Magnificent production values and carefully observed performances from Phil Davis (as Vassily playing a similar role to the one he played in the BBC’s Bleakhouse) and Conleth Hill (who I last saw in Democracy) deliver the quality of production one expects, but don’t always get at the National.
A Resounding Tinkle – N.F. Simpson
Gladly Otherwise – N.F. Simpson
The Crimson Hotel – Michael Frayn
This triple bill of British ‘absurdist’ theatre is a refreshing treat. Not to be confused with the tortured existential ‘theatre of the absurd’, this is absurdity as humour. N.F. Simpson was a contemporary of the Goons, who play with paradox and logic, and a precursor of Monty Python’s extensive use of absurdity for humour in which the extraordinary is treated as the everyday. So, in A Resounding Tinkle , written fifty years ago, a suburban couple (whose surname is Paradocks) are trying to come to terms with an oversized elephant that has been delivered to their home in a scenario that is today described anachronistically as Pythonesque. The show is full of such delightful whimsy.
Frayn’s The Crimson Hotel is a particularly cunning piece of deconstructed farce in a similar vein to Woody Allen’s Lovborg’s Women Reconsidered. The script is a gift for drama teachers.
The Donmar as always makes ingenious use of sound and set design. Crimson Hotel concludes with the female lead, Lyndsey Marshal, literally disappearing in to an average-sized picnic basket!
Unfortunately, the best London critics it seems are in Edinburgh at the Festival and the third rung that have remained behind have given Absurdia a perplexed dismissal – ‘just nonsense’ declares a major daily. Fortunately, Billington managed to squeeze it in before his departure and gave it heaps of hard-earned praise.
