A memorable 2015 parliamentary select committee hearing asked Kids Company CEO Camila Batmanghelidjh and chair of trustees Alan Yentob whether the organisation was ever fit for purpose.
It’s a bigly Trump-fest over at the Donmar, with adaptor Bruce Norris determined to make Brecht great again – or at least pointedly contemporary.
Politics is a serious business, but it’s also a spectator sport. Think of the duels in Prime Minister’s Questions; or the marathon that is Brexit. It’s a place of cartoon villains (Corbyn), straight villains (Trump) and plain cartoons (Boris). But while the pace of events makes writing about the present rather perilous, the past is a happy hunting ground, an area full of stories that all seem to prove one depressing thing: that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
How’s this for a Christmas-week story? Joan, a young peasant girl – played in this version by the charismatically attractive Gemma Arterton – grows up in the bleak French countryside. She hears voices. It’s 1429, and they tell her to lift the siege of Orleans and defeat the English invaders. She inspires troops, she inspires the Dauphin. She helps crown him King of France. She is betrayed, captured by the English, tried as a heretic and burnt at the stake. Some 25 years later, the authorities realise that they have made a terrible mistake.
You can easily see why George Bernard Shaw’s play, which was first put on in 1923, soon after Joan’s canonisation as a saint, is regarded as a tragedy, albeit a tragedy without villains, since all of the main protagonists behave more or less in good faith. Its full title is Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue, and Shaw’s own wordy preface includes his vision of the moral of the story: “It is what men do at their best, with good intentions, and what normal men and women find that they must and will do in spite of their intentions.” Yes, there are no winners in this tale.
Joan is a member of the awkward squad, a danger to complacency
This modern-dress version of the play (pictured below), is directed by Josie Rourke and designed by Robert Jones, and starts with Duncan McLean’s video screens proclaiming the Shawism: “Must Christ perish in every age to save those that have no imagination?” and, in tribute to the anniversary of another war, showing the steady fall of red poppy petals. Then we are in the world of Bloomberg and commodities futures, as the screen reports that egg prices are soaring because of an inexplicable shortage (an in-joke about the play, which indeed starts with Joan’s miraculous ability to make hens lay eggs). The story then unfolds through a series of set-piece scenes – Joan meets the Dauphin, Joan relieves Orleans, the English plot Joan’s downfall, Joan is tried and condemned as a heretic.
Although the play has its Shavian windbag longueurs, this production radiates with contemporary resonance. First, it is a story about an outsider who galvanises a nation, making it proud and patriotic again (echoes of Brexit), and, second, it is also a story about social justice, and individual responsibility. Joan upsets the hierarchical feudal system by insisting that she doesn’t need the church as an intermediary: God speaks to her directly. In her fanaticism, we can hear echoes of any religious fundamentalist. And her trial for heresy, during which she is also accused of witchcraft, shows how men hate women who succeed. For Joan is a member of the awkward squad, a danger to complacency and routine: one of the charges against her was her transvestitism.
Inevitably Arterton has to carry the weight of all of this on her well-toned shoulders. Luckily, despite her warrior gear, this is a modern-day production so it doesn’t matter that she never looks or acts like a peasant girl. Instead, her performance has the sweet naivety of the well-brought-up young woman whose beliefs inspire her to be goodness incarnate. It’s also a very tactile reading: Joan touches the hands, the arms and the faces of her accusers in a genuinely saintly manner, glowing with forgiveness. A mixture of eloquent simplicity and ardent fanaticism, she attracts and repels in equal measure. It’s probably blasphemous to call her acting miraculous, but at some moments it really feels like that.
The rest of the cast (the men) can’t really compete with this radiance, although I liked Fisayo Akinade’s campy Dauphin, Niall Buggy’s aggressive archbishop, Hadley Fraser’s loyal Dunois and Jo Stone-Fewings’s scheming Warwick. Richard Cant, Syrus Lowe, Rory Keenan and Matt Bardock take on a couple of roles each. Amid constant video reminders of Joan’s place in the iconography of the Catholic church, and on a revolving stage, this is a very long, but intellectually fascinating and emotionally moving evening. Despite its contemporary relevance, there may not be a lot of Christmas cheer to be derived from this story, but some crumbs of cold comfort will almost certainly fall into your lap.
MORE GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ON THEARTSDESK
Mrs Warren's Profession, Comedy Theatre (2010). Felicity Kendal in plodding revival of Shaw's take on prostitution
Pygmalion, Chichester Festival Theatre (2010). Rupert Everett's sulky Higgins is outsmarted by Honeysuckle Weeks's Eliza (pictured)
The Doctor's Dilemma, National Theatre (2012). Tragedy is the spoonful of sugar that helps this medical satire go down
Widowers' Houses, Orange Tree Theatre (2014). A timely revival of a timeless satire
Man and Superman, National Theatre (2015). A theatrical trip to Hell with Ralph Fiennes has some heavenly moments
The Philanderer, Orange Tree Theatre (2016). Modern-dress Shaw is resonant but long-winded
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OVERLEAF: MORE GEMMA ARTERTON ON THEARTSDESK
If you are new to the Donmar Warehouse all-female stagings of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Henry IV – 2012 and 2014 respectively – the biggest surprise is not so much that these highly masculine dramas are performed entirely by women. It is their being set in a prison. With the long-planned trilogy now rounded off with The Tempest, which has premiered in the Donmar’s purpose-built 420-seater just north of King’s Cross, the device has attained lock-stock-and-barrel totality.
Kemp Powers’s play is set in a motel room in Miami on the night of 25 February 1964, after Cassius Clay (as Muhammad Ali then was) had earlier beaten Sonny Liston to gain the world heavyweight title. He is joined by two friends, the singer Sam Cooke and the American football star Jim Brown, and his political and spiritual mentor, the civil rights activist Malcolm X.
Oh dear. I could have sworn I had a book about Irish playwright Brian Friel somewhere. But I can’t find it. Or maybe I never bought it. Maybe I just thought I might have bought it. Maybe it’s a false memory. Better ask my wife. Now at least I’m in the zone, that place called ambiguity that is, aptly enough, one of the characteristics of Friel’s 1979 play, Faith Healer, which is being revived with a starry cast at this boutique venue. With its themes of miracle cures, bitter exile and fallible memory, this tale is as resonant as ever.
Playwright Nick Payne has carved out a distinctive dramatic territory – neuroscience. In his big 2012 hit, Constellations, he explored the effect on memory of living with a brain tumour, while two years later in Incognito, the story of what happened to Albert Einstein’s brain was married to the case of a man who had parts of his grey matter removed to cure his epileptic seizures.
It’s often remarked that are no new stories, only old stories retold. The French playwright Jean Anouihl got the idea for his first play from a French newspaper report of 1919, about a young man who turned up on a railway platform with no knowledge of who he was or how he came to be there. In the wake of the story’s publication, hundreds of bereaved families came forward to claim the unknown soldier as their own.
In the icy early hours of 1 February 1918 a bizarre figure was seen wandering aimlessly along the platform of a railway station in Lyon. A solider. Lost. When asked his name he answered, “Anthelme Mangin”. Other than that he had no memory of who he was, of where he had been, of where he was going, or of what had happened to him prior to arriving on that station platform on that frigid February night.