Reviews of the first production at Tarragon

THEATRE REVIEW Director's smokescreen clouds Jehanne Jehanne of The Witches

Thursday, November 23, 1989

RAY CONLOGUE

Written by Sally Clark Directed by Clarke Rogers Starring JoAnn McIntyre, Maria Ricossa and Sky Gilbert BY RAY CONLOGUE The Globe and Mail UNFORTUNATELY, the most interesting thing about Jehanne of The Witches, Sally Clark's new play at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre, is trying to figure out what on earth it was meant to be.

The play, she writes, issued from a challenge by director Clarke Rogers that she should write a play about women's power. Playwright Clark likes to put an interesting spin on things, so she descended on the historical rumor that Joan of Arc was associated with witchcraft cults of her time.

From this emerged what looked, briefly during the play's opening scenes, like an interesting tale. In the remote corner of France that was Domremy, young Jehanne (JoAnn McIntyre) is torn between the instruction of the local priest and the "old religion" - the matriarchal religion - of her mother (Terry Tweed), who worships the moon and meets with other women in the forest by night. The voices that speak to Joan, which she identifies reluctantly as Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, are in fact female deities of ancient provenance. Through their power she gains the military strength that so appalled the patriarchal Church.

The immediate problem is that Clarke Rogers, while he may have asked for the play, clearly doesn't believe a word of it. He has decided to turn it into an evening of adolescent kitsch.

Hence, we have McIntyre seizing on the dialogue (which admittedly is so colloquial and contemporary in its humor that it leaves itself open to such treatment) to give us an improbably winsome and coy Jehanne; and worse, a Jehanne from whom the actress clearly wishes to dissociate herself.

And even worse, we have Sky Gilbert in the pivotal role of Gilles de Rais, a real historical character who fought by Jehanne's side and helped win her victories. In the play he is presented as a homosexual voluptuary. Since this is the role with which Gilbert has long identified himself publicly, once he utters his opening line of the evening - "Get me another boy, the last one didn't work out" - it is a sure thing that Gilles de Rais will be a coarse spoof, whatever the author might have intended.

The carnage continues. Patrick Brymer plays the Dauphin as an obnoxious caricature of the weak man he was, a notion underscored by the costume Denyse Karn has designed for him: from the waist up, a fleur-de-lis chestpiece like those worn by the nobles of the court; from the waist down, a powder-blue fluffy little skirt. Brymer camps up the performance to match the costume.

All the first-act costumes are grotesquely ill-made, which has probably been justified by the fact that the act is a play-within-a-play, Gilles de Rais's re-enactment of Jehanne's story 20 years after her death. But the manner of the grotesqueness, which makes the de Rais play ridiculous rather than naive or primitive, is the director's choice.

Pushing aside all this lumber, one tries to hear the play itself. The tale of Jehanne's rise to lead the French army is perfunctorily written, often sounding like an abbreviated version of similar scenes in Bernard Shaw's play. Clark has reserved her writerly passions for the second act, where it is revealed that "Jehanne" is in fact a boy actor named Francois, de Rais's current lover.

This, one suspects, is the dramatic fulcrum of the tale. De Rais, who was an alchemist, has often been blamed for betraying Jehanne to the English and the Church. Clark imagines him as a man torn between the old religion and the new one. After betraying Jehanne to her death, he guiltily retreats to the old religion and through witchcraft tries to bring her back to life. His "formula" is theatre, the re-enactment of her death in order to inspire her resurrection.

These scenes are awkwardly written, but they show the spark of Clark's own humor and dramatic sense. There is a genuinely funny moment, for example, when "Jehanne's" loss of magic power is revealed by the return of her menstrual cycle: the young actor Francois notices to his horror that his crotch has been smeared with fake blood. "Nobody told me about this!" he cries in male disgust, a disgust amusingly amplified by the fact that Francois is being played by a woman.

But the business of sex roles, and of the movement of power, is overly complicated in the script as it stands. Clark seems still to be sorting her material, and has not focused it dramatically. But it is hard to see how she could do this, working with a director who sees the script not as a drama, or even as a comedy, but as a gross spoof.


THEATRE REVIEW Rigorous direction needed for wild Joan of Arc story

November 23rd, 1989

ROBERT CREW


A couple of seasons ago there was an air of delightful unpredictability about Theatre Passe Muraille under then-artistic director Clarke Rogers. You never quite knew what you were going to get - good, bad or indifferent.

Then the theatre ran into problems. Two productions were cancelled and Rogers departed.

One of those shows was Sally Clark's Jehanne Of The Witches, which was slated to premiere in February of 1988 but finally opened Tuesday night . . . at Tarragon Theatre, of all places.

The character of the old Passe Muraille lives on in this production, directed by Rogers. It is wild, undisciplined and off the wall. Much of it is poor theatre, poorly acted and with bad laughs aplenty.

On the other hand, it is often highly theatrical, and just occasionally there are tantalizing glimpses of something that could possibly be very fine.

Rogers, with his drifting, free-association style of directing, is exactly wrong for this play, which needs some strong and rigorous dramaturgy to knock it into some semblance of shape.

Playwright Clark has latched onto a fascinating yarn. The Joan of Arc story is a well-worn subject in dramatic literature but she gives it a fresh perspective by letting the notorious Gilles de Rais, otherwise known as Bluebeard, share the spotlight.

The historical de Rais, courtier, homosexual libertine, alchemist and possibly black magician and mass murderer, was a friend of Joan's and fought alongside her. Jehanne, which uses the play- within-a-play format, takes place some time after Joan has been burned at the stake.

De Rais, who might have been able to save her, is now seeking to raise Joan's spirit by putting on a play about her. As we learn halfway through, he has cast a look-a-like boy as Joan and is staging his Mystery play in Orleans.

But Clark's underlying concern is the empowerment of women. When we first meet Jehanne, she is getting to know her various "voices" who are physical presences on stage that she and only she can see.

All the "voices" are female, including the Archangel Michael. The others are the war-like Saint Catherine and her opposite, the mother- earth, creative and birthing figure of Saint Margaret.

There are many other tensions in the play - the idea of the Old Religion, witchcraft and the transmutation of base metals into gold versus the forces of Christianity, the fixed polarities of woman-as- saint or woman-as-whore, the empowering strength of innocence and virginity or the vampiric paradox of drawing strength from the drawing of blood, and so on.

It's a rich primal stew in which to wallow, which is precisely what this production does.

The actors - JoAnn McIntyre as Jehanne, Sky Gilbert as de Rais, Maria Ricossa, Terry Tweed and Jennifer Dean as the various "voices", Patrick Brymer, Ted Johns and John Blackwood - are called on to try everything from Monty-Python silly comedy, to campy melodrama and dialectic debate.

The result is that they never get comfortable and settle down to give measured, relaxed work. Too often, they make the easy, one- dimensional choices.

There's a touch of the devil in Sally Clark, who seems to like nothing better than to make an outrageous statement then sit back and become the detached observer as sparks fly. But such whimsy has to have some philosophical underpinning to save it from the charge of being mere perversity. It may be in the text but Rogers fails to elicit it.

After an unhappy experience with the Canadian Stage production of The Trial Of Judith K, Clark could have used a hit to confirm the promise she showed in last season's Moo. This production of Jehanne isn't it.