Review of production at Waterdale Theatre, Edmonton 1999

THEATRE REVIEW: "Witches" a challenging choice; Play-within-a-play structure murky

January 23rd 1999

LIZ NICHOLLS


Joan of Arc's famous Voices roll their eyes. "I don't mind the Christians really," says one, with a worldly shrug. "But since they've defined reality, they're the only ones we appear to."

There's a kind of mouthy showbiz exasperation about the all-girl trio of Joan's advisers in Sally Clark's 1988 take on the peasant girl from the sticks who saves 15th century France from its foreign occupiers and ends up in flames. They're big on virginity: "It gives you clarity." And sacrifice: "It will give you power." And they point out useful men, with the advice to "manipulate him." But they're a bit vague on the details: "Nothing ventured, nothing gained."

Another challenging choice for community theatre from Walterdale's fearless artistic director Andrea Martinuk, Jehanne of the Witches is an oddly structured, feisty, dense tragi-comedy set at the moment in European history when the Christian church and the pagan pantheon are competing for clientele. Jehanne's mother, for example, much prefers moon goddess worship to all this running off to mass. "Now there's only one god," she sighs, "and He doesn't have time." Female power is clearly in tough; in the 1420s and '30s you can't go around blabbing about your links to it, or you'll lose, big time.

Joan herself, as delineated in Michelle Martinuk's engaging performance, has something of the blunt, reductive quality of the innocent but devastating heroine of Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, without her gift of the gab. But the real oddity of this piece by Vancouver-based Clark, and its juiciest character, is the historical figure of Gilles de Rais (Len Falkenstein). A mystery man with the nickname Bluebeard, he fought with Joan in battle, saved her life on several occasions, and staged a large-cast community spectacle, The Mystery of the Siege of Orleans, after not intervening to thwart her execution at the stake. His sexual habits were rapacious and deadly: it's thought he sodomized hundreds of young boys and murdered them.

Here, he's intrigued, maybe attracted, by the country maid with the connections to a source of female power. And complicating this relationship, only schematically outlined in Clark's play, is the fact that he's lured a young boy with a resemblance into playing the role of Joan in his spectacular.

That de Rais is the heavy-hitter in a play about Joan of Arc is provocative, to say the least. And while Falkenstein taps a silky, predatory malevolence in his witty, supple performance, much of the web of male fears and the sexual/political power struggle is left unexplored. To be fair, I think the play-within-a-play structure is never fruitfully developed in the script, but it never stops being murky in Martinuk's production. And it's quite hard to detect any real chemistry between de Rais, the young actor he's enlisted, and the woman-to-be who's under strict orders from her Voices to be seductive.

Director Martinuk does get vivid performances from her company in the smaller roles. Kelly Simpson as the sneering, decadent Bishop Cauchon is amusing. Ditto David Owen as the sulky, self-absorbed Dauphin, and later a similarly self-admiring God. The Voices get a nifty contemporary edge from Kristine Nutting, Adrienne Smook and Cathy Lakin, the latter doubling as Joan's mom. As a take on the historical moment when female power and all its mystical accoutrements went backstage, so to speak, the play has some edge, even if the experience doesn't quite add up.

Michelle Casavant's set gets to the crux of the matter: it's dominated by marble pillars sprouting branches.