Review of production at Dark Horse Theatre in Vancover 1991

THEATRE REVIEW: Smouldering Joan all talk with no fire

March 22nd, 1991

LLOYD DYKK


SALLY CLARK'S Jehanne of the Witches doesn't tell you much, but it does give you an idea of what it must have been like to be Joan of Arc, at least in the final stages.

Two-and-one-half hours in the play's company and it felt like I was being martyred at the stake myself.

Did I say it doesn't tell you much? Actually, the problem is that it tells you much too much. Talking and talking and talking, it makes its insuperably boring way without ever giving you an analogue of human thought. Its idea of dramaturgy seems to be that there should not be a cogent working out of themes but continuous exposition throughout.

Information is continously dribbled to you, the apparent assumption being that you're on the edge of your seat, not only keeping everything straight but in suspense, too. After a point, you just don't care, or I certainly didn't. It seems a cruelly self-indulgent thing to subject an audience to.

Clark has said that she wrote it "partly as a dare" when challenged to "write a play about positive female power," and it plays like something written on a dare.

The subject is Joan of Arc, and her relationship to Gilles de Rais, the marshal of France who fought with Jehanne against the English to crown Charles dauphin in Reims. A sorcerer, Gilles de Rais was also thought to be the kidnapper, torturer and murderer of more than 100 children.

Without going into the baroque details, Clark has worked this into a laborious metaphor for female coming-into-power and Christianity and male dominance versus paganism and natural impulse, all this weighty porridge made even denser by imposing a play-within-a-play conceit.

What glimmerings there are are deadened by a deaf ear for language and a misconceived sense of comedy. Often it seems as though she were actually trying to write bad dialogue.

The production, directed by Robert Garfat, is monotonously staged and few in the cast except for Marilyn Norry, Dwight McFee and Ruth McIntosh seem to have much of a sense of their characters, or even a consistent idea of how to pronounce "dauphin" for that matter. On top of that, on Thursday there were plenty of flubbed lines and an accidental lighting blackout.

But the big blackout is the script. It must have taken a big "dare" to prompt a play based on a character that Bernard Shaw has already made "relevant," and with a considerably wider scope of philosophical enquiry.