Was the road to Rouen really the road to ruin for Jeanne D’Arc?
The story goes that the Maid of Orleans was made barbecue steak in Rouen, burned as a heretic by the same Church that canonised her some centuries later.
In writer/director Paul Gilchrist’s new play, JOAN, AGAIN, Joan appears a decade after the pyre in a sleepy little village called Plume. Perhaps she has chosen the place because its name is synonymous with smoke.
Plume’s claim to fame is its beds and it’s amongst the peasant feather pluckers that Joan reveals herself and instantly causes conflict.
Misanthropist matriarch of the mattress business, Isabelle (Helen Tonkin) doubts the person purporting to be Joan (Sylvia Keays) putting her into direct opposition to her only surviving child, Bernadette (Bonnie Kellett).
Her niece, Marie (Kitty Hopwood) also buys Joan’s bona fides when her returned soldier husband, Gerard (James Collette) identifies her in the affirmative.
Isabelle rants and vents against Gerard and Joan, seeing in both reminders of a war that has reduced most of her family to fertiliser in the field of France.
Genuine or fraud, Joan’s timing to appear in Plume is off, as the Grand Inquisitor, Cardinal Theobald (Lyndon Jones) and his overzealous acolyte, Father Berthold (Ted Crosby) have ducked down to the town in transit to meetings of overblown importance with other minor luminaries.
These two allow Gilchrist to target the hypocrisies of the Church, where superstition trumps spirituality and fear dictates faith. These are the embodiment of Catch 22 catechists who indoctrinate and damn to suit their own agenda.
Awash with words, verbally viscous at times, the most affecting characters in the play are the ones with fewer lines.
Compelling in her silence and stillness is Kit Bennett as Therese, quiet as a mouse and considered by some as the ‘village idiot”. And when she does speak, it is delivered with an eloquence and poignancy that speaks volumes.
As her father, Felix, Dave Kirkham imbues the flustered feather farmer with humanity, pathos and humour. Both these performers live up to the production company mantle of subtle nuance.
JOAN, AGAIN runs Tue-Sat 8pm and Sundays 5pm at The Old Fitzroy, Woolloomooloo till August 23.