THE SCOTSMAN - Four star review
Everything here is simply Saintly
Published Date: 12 August 2008
By CLAIRE WOOD
Saint Joan ****
Duddingston Kirk Manse Garden
GEORGE Bernard Shaw considered Saint Joan to be his greatest work and it's easy to see why. And Theatre Alba's production, imaginatively directed by Charles Nowosielski, sees the actors add to this in a stunning loch-side setting.
Strong performances make it hard to single out individuals but Anna Guthrie is an impressive Joan, wholly believable as the wide-eyed village girl terrified but inspired by her mission. Philip Kingscott is an ebullient but malleable Dauphin; Robin Thomson, a chilling Inquisitor; and David Elliot, a cavalier but courageous soldier.
It's rare to see a complete production of a classic play on the Fringe, let alone in such a spectacular setting.
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ReviewsGate.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 24 August at Duddingston Kirk Manse Gardens Edinburgh.
Some roughness along the way hardly detracts from the impact of an understanding production with a splendidly-performed heroine: whaur’s yer National Theatre noo?
With her love of her native countryside, Bernard Shaw’s Joan of Arc is a good candidate for outdoor production ...
At least there’s little furniture to rearrange; only a table and chair in the wide space of Duddingston Kirk Manse gardens. Both take on significance during the evening. Naïve young Joan sits happily in her host’s chair as she makes her way early on, confident of leading the French to victory against the English invaders, as unaware of her lack of protocol as she is of anything apart from her holy mission, delivered direct from three saints.
Under the table is both bed and hiding-place for the ineffectual Dauphin. Chair and table are later the place for the powerful Bishop Cauchon, investigating Joan for witchcraft. By then, she no longer roams the space, being surrounded and confined by powerful males. Shaw has made clear, in a crucial central dialogue, how Joan, unawares, threatens these leaders of church and state.
As she’s encircled by the male establishments, with its calculating leaders and their unthinking inferiors, such as Shaw’s regulation stupid Englishman de Stogumber, Nowosielski provides a further dimension with three silent females, the saints who guide Joan (one of these angels is male, but they are presumably not bound by human laws). Up to her burning, they give a strong sense of a spiritually protective enclave.
There is some heavy-weather in some of the male performances. Yet it hardly matters when the spirit of the play’s so clearly expressed. And they serve to contrast the fresh energy of Anna Guthrie’s Joan. Radiant and truthful as the girl whose inspiration isn’t channelled through sophisticated thinking, Guthrie, with the thematic use of the simple furnishings, turns what could be a kitsch final moment, as Joan, hair backlit, stands on the table where she’s been judged to deliver her final call to God, into a dramatic climax as well as a theatrical frisson.
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