Meg Roe Laughs
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
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| Meg Roe |
Last night, my Rosemary and I went to the Arts Club Theatre Company opening night presentation of George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan, directed by Kim Collier. It was held at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Theatre. I went prepared for a sombre evening. Somehow it wasn't.
Often memory fails me.
I see it as a red carpet behind me that is rolled up as the section in front is
rolled out. I have little memory
of the two St. Joan films I have seen in my distant past. One was the 1957 film St. Joan
with Jean Seberg directed by Otto
Preminger with screenplay by Graham Greene, John Gielgud as the Earl of Warwick,
Felix Aylmer as the Inquisitor and Richard Widmark (I wish I could remember
that performance!) as the Dauphin, Charles VII. The other was director Victor
Fleming’s 1948 Joan of Arc with Ingrid Bergman. Only the Preminger version was
based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1924 play.
In both of those films
the two St. Joan protagonists had infamy/fame
as accompany baggage which clouded for many the initial perception of the films. Of
the latter film, the one with Ingrid Bergman, noted and now retired theatrical
critic Christopher Dafoe (there he was (!), on opening night with his son Christopher,
former arts critic for the Globe & Mail and now a busy lawyer) told me that in a
recent viewing he thought it was more awful than before. On anything about the
Arts Club/Kim Collier St. Joan he kept his cards close to his chest which he accompanied
with a delightful and most pleasant smile.
I could cite the
excellent performances by Dean Paul Gibson as the Earl of Warwick, of Scott
Bellis as the English leaning French cleric, Bishop Cauchon (Costume Designer Christine Reimer, plagued with her actors weating bad theatrical armour, designed a beautiful red bishop's outfit that was spectacular)
and Tom McBeath as the Enquisitor. I do.
and Tom McBeath as the Enquisitor. I do.
I was particularly
surprised that in the whole play nobody stood out as an out and out villain. It
seemed that events simply happened in a sort of momentum of history. In his
preface to the play GBS (he was that many years before John F. Kennedy was JFK)
wrote:
There are no villains in the piece. Crime, like
disease, is not interesting: it is something to be done away with by general
consent, and that is all [there is] about it. It is what men do at their best,
with good intentions, and what normal men and women find that they must and
will do in spite of their intentions, that really concern us.
His best known
biographer Michael Holroyd wrote:
“St. Joan is a tragedy
without villains and it is Shaw’s only tragedy.”
Interesting to me is the fact that while the
Dauphin was crowned on 17 July, 1429, King of France (Charles VII) at Reims (thanks to Joan), on 16 December, 1429, Henry VI of England, was
crowned King of France at Notre Dame in Paris. It also seems that Henry VI may have been
present to some of the sittings of Joan’s trial.
Aside from all the fascinating stories
behind Shaw’s play I managed to have a short chat with Christopher Gaze,
Artistic Director of Bard on the Beach, who having been Shakespeare’s Henry V many
times, happens to know more than a little about the Hundred Year’s War (It was
Henry V who won at Agincourt before the advent of Joan when things began to
sour for the les goddams English). He asked me about the play and I told him, “Your
man and that second act were the best.” I did not have to explain that “his man”
was Dean Paul Gibson. Gaze called the part of the second act (our mutual favourite) in which you have
the Earl of Warwick (Gibson), Bishop Cauchon (Bellis) and Chaplain DeStogumber
discussing Joan at a banquet table “the tent scene.” It is here where Shaw
mentions subjects with linked together in importance in our 21st century,
Christianity, “Mohammedanism”, Protestantism and nationalism. The second part
of Act II is where things begin to go against Roe's Joan.
Since I am not a theatre critic I cannot
begin to write opinions here that are beyond my basic expertise of clicking shutters.
But since I am not a theatre critic I can venture into other areas without
having to delve in that journalistic rule of when, where and how.
Sometime in the 80s I listened in my car to
a recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 (the one with that most
impossible part for a clarino trumpet). I had to stop the car to see what was
wrong with my tape deck. The concerto directed by Pablo Casals was much too
fast. Nothing was wrong. It was just a startlingly new approach to the music by
Casals. I soon got used to it. Now most other recordings or the many live performances
have attended have all seemed agonizingly slow.
With the performance of Jean Seberg as Joan
somewhere in my hidden neurons I was completely taken off guard by Meg Roe’s
take on Joan in the first act. She laughed, she giggled and she did more
laughing and more giggling. I was taken aback. Was this in Shaw’s script
(perhaps in pencil, laugh, giggle, laugh)? Was this a crazed conspiracy between the
one female actor Roe (there were two female singers in the play, Christine Quintana
and Shannon Chan-Kent) and the female director Kim Collier?
I thought about this and immediately went
back to the memory of the relationship that actress Molly Parker had with
director Lynne Stopkewich in Kissed, 1996, and Suspicious River, 2000, films,
intense films, that were made possible, I believe, only because of that special relationship that
only two women can have as I wrote here?
Gaze told me that Collier instructed Dean
Paul Gibson to speak with a marked English accent (I liked that!). Did Collier
tell Roe to laugh and giggle?
After the shock of that first act
reinforced by the several occasions in which Rowe (not a tall woman) stood next
to Captain Robert de Baudricourt played by Bob Frazer, a tall man, which made the
result one that almost made me giggle, I realized I was watching something akin
to Casal’s Brandenburg. This was a performance that was going to grow on me with time. This was another Roe Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? ,The Penelopiad , Toronto, Mississippi kind of performance.
By the third act Roe came back to familiar
territory and was the actress I have been used to savouring. Roe was
devastating as the suffering Joan about to be burned at the stake.
In the middle of the night after I had
returned home it dawned on me that as a frequent theatre goer I can assert here
that if there is any play in which Meg Roe is in the cast that is enough
justification to go and see it. And one must trust, as I now trust, her
judgment on how she will interpret her part. It comes from someone who exceeds
the high standards that our city imposes on its actors.
There is a word for this in Spanish. We
call such people fenómenos. I have
used it to describe the dancing of Evelyn Hart. We have Evelyn Hart. We have
Meg Roe. We are so lucky.
Indeed Jean Seberg as St. Joan smiles and laughs, too.
Addendum: Sometimes my Rosemary has trouble hearing an actor who speaks away from where we might be sitting. The Stanley has had a problem here for us for some time. I am happy to report that she tried the special sound enhancing earphones, available (at the coat check), and that they were a success.
Indeed Jean Seberg as St. Joan smiles and laughs, too.
Addendum: Sometimes my Rosemary has trouble hearing an actor who speaks away from where we might be sitting. The Stanley has had a problem here for us for some time. I am happy to report that she tried the special sound enhancing earphones, available (at the coat check), and that they were a success.
