‘Saint Joan’
Traverse Theatre 21/3/26
‘St Joan’ - A Raw Materials, Perth Theatre and Aberdeen Performing Arts Co-Production in association with Citizens Theatre
By George Bernard Shaw, reimagined by Stewart Laing
Mandipa Kabanda, Martin O’Connor and cast
Tonight I’m going to that rare thing in a Scottish Theatre, a well-known classical play - the last night of George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Saint Joan’. After opening at the Citizens it toured to Perth and Aberdeen before four Traverse performances. I confess I nearly didn’t come – after all this wasn’t the ‘Saint Joan’ I’d read at school – and never seen on stage – but one that was ‘re-imagined’. I need not have worried: Stewart’s Laing’s direction of his own version on a bare Traverse stage is assured and straightforward. Anyone knowing the story, and understanding that the narration, expertly delivered by Martin O’Connor, is a film script, soon gets used to such instructions as “the camera zooms in on the tower in the distance”. In one hour thirty minutes, the six-strong cast deliver a shortened version of Shaw’s play, playing all the roles, with Scots accents for the French and English accents for the English. There are more expletives than the Lord Chamberlain would have allowed in 1924 but most of the words are Shaw’s.
Mandipa Kabanda from Bathgate in her first professional role is a compelling Joan. Dressed, like all the cast, in casual clothes, she’s a young woman in a hurry, eager to state her case and get down to action. She convinces Thierry Mabonga’s sweary Robert and Ross Mann, the nerdy put-upon Dauphin, (in distinctly passé tracksuit), and soon the French army - a shouting line-up in front of a whiteboard - is taking on the unseen English. Rolling drums behind the board ratchet up the sound of battle. Joan arranges Charles’ coronation, but already the English commanders have begun to talk about her ‘witchcraft’. Her single-mindedness is deplored by the Church authorities. Shaw explores this contradiction: here is a young woman who believes she is sent from God; but He is head of the Church. Why then can’t she accept the Church’s judgement?
A short scene, not in the original, shows Joan’s capture, and the whirling speed of the first half is replaced by the slower-paced, almost static, formality of the Trial. All the cast are onstage, dressed in furry robes, apart from Joan who sits in school uniform and looks at her phone. Sophistries and logical possibilities are tested in the preliminaries between the officials of Church and State. Martin O’Connor has the longest speech of the play as the oozily smiling Inquisitor. Joan, remains firm but, eventually bamboozled, she agrees to sign a declaration to avoid burning at the stake. She makes her mark, but when told that she will instead face life-imprisonment she rips up the paper (a scene Arthur Miller must have had in mind when he wrote the end of ‘The Crucible’). There are no sound or lighting effects for her death: she stands against the whiteboard, an English soldier gives her a cross. Shaw’s epilogue which reflects on Joan’s canonisation in 1920 (the authority of the Catholic Church took several centuries to be mollified), is replaced by a film showing news clips of women playing prominent roles in recent demonstrations. It ends symbolically with Mandipa Kabanda covering herself with tar and feathers and “flying” out over a modern-day Glasgow. Traverse 1 was about 90% full, and the audience applauded vigorously. This was an excellent and enjoyable production
