JOHN: The Drama Guild of the University of Ottawa presents The Lark, the play about Joan of Arc by French writer Jean Anouilh. A hefty piece of theatre with a big cast, a play full of acting traps. How did this company of young people pull it off? Well, Alvina Ruprecht has seen the play.
ALVINA: Well your are right about one thing John. The Lark, one of the great classics of postwar French theatre, is play full of real difficulties and the result was only so so. This is a very stylish translation by English playwright Christopher Fry, it captures the irony, the playfulness and undercurrents of suppressed sexuality, a host of things including a character on the brink of madness. All that posed a great challenge to these young performers. The Lark is based on the trial of Joan of Arc but Anouilh does it as a play within a play.
JOHN: So he creates a distance between the audience and the actors..
ALVINA: That's right. The historical characters come wandering on stage as though they aren't sure they are in the right place..they have just appeared out of the 15th century, dumped into the present as it were as the language shifts from contemporary colloquial to more sophisticated almost classical speech. This company has understood all that and director Sandra McNeill orchestrated those first moments well. Then the Earl of Warwick (Matt Miwa) comes bounding in, he appears to be the stage master, he announces that they are doing a performance to prepare fora the trial and one of the characters insists that Joan tell all the events leading up to her trial.
So they stage her astronomical career as the Maid of Orleans. How she convinces The Dauphin of France to put her in charge of the royal army so she can go off to Orleans, capture back the city, set Charles the Dauphin on the throne and chase les Anglais into the sea. By doing this as theatre within theatre, they remove the stage illusion of reality, they show that they are playing with history, that there is not historical truth, and so History becomes a stylistic exercise where Joan, burnt or not, becomes a legend.
JOHN: You mentioned Sandra McNeill staged this. Tell us more about that.
ALVINA: I think that her directing was one of the weak points of the production. The beautiful period costumes were designed by Judith de Boer. The set and lighting were designed by award winning set designer Roy Robitschek! Who no longer lives in Ottawa but who used to design for the GCTC. He has created a beautifully suggestive set using fragments of earthy tone of material hanging at difference angles or draped over poles, and then lit in such a way that the light constructs the set. Still the acting space is a fairly wide open space with the nobles and church representatives sitting on either side, and at the back as well. But as Joan and the others perform their scenes to this on stage audience, I got the feeling that there was much awkward moving around,; the Inquisitor was too far upstage, the huge space was not exploited the way it could have been. Also, the pace was very uneven. It's a play where the spoken text is central. There are lot of long discussions, and a lot of talk in general. And too often the speeches felt long and drawn out because the rhythms were slow, the energy level was way down, or the actors reacted too slowly to each other. And there was too much harsh yelling - being emotional doesn't mean yelling...or they skimmed over the lines and didn't get the irony or the nuances. The Earl of Warwick has to stop swallowing his words. I had trouble understanding him part of the time. This director didn't seem hear much of the text nor did she have much control over the interpretations or over the way the voices were used. That's the impression I had.
JOHN: What about the actors?
ALVINA: Well there were some very good actor and some managed to get through it all quite well. For example, Aron De Casmaker played the insecure Dauphin on the brink of madness. He turned the character into a sort of campy ham, totally overdone but given the slowness of a good part of the play, Casmaker brought lots of energy to the stage and so I rather enjoyed his comic interludes. The scene with the card game, where he teaches Joan how to play cards, and she gives him courage, ended in a flutter of cards all over the stage that was quite well done. I liked the energy of Phillip Dunlop as the wild and exciting Captain, the hunchback hangman...and others. He kept appearing in all sorts of character roles and he made the changes very convincing. And there was the glacial rigidity of the Promoter, played by Simon Bradshaw who has an excellent voice, even though he tended to yell too much.
JOHN: And Joan of Arc. Who played her?
ALVINA: An actress called Nancy Kenny and she did quite a good job, given the difficulty of it all. Such a juicy role this Joan, she has to evolve from a naive little 15 year old sheepherder who hears voices, to an illuminated warrior who stirs kings and soldiers, who argues with theologians and who is not afraid to be burned alive at the stake.. Totally unrealistic, a pure stage fiction and it has to be played that way. They tried. The character did evolve slowly but instead of yelling so much she might have tried to convey more of a sense of illumination, of someone possessed by her beliefs, on the edge of fanaticism and that isn't necessarily done by yelling. Again, weak directing. But Christopher Fry's translation is so good, there are some good actors, and the play is generally fun to watch. It did last over 3 hours; if they tightened up the performance they could cut at least 20 minutes off the running time.