Not Hamlet by Janet Suzman

Author:Janet Suzman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OBERON BOOKS Ltd

The Two Joans

IDON’T THINK Saint Joan is a Hamlet. I think Shaw’s wrong. First of all, Hamlet is the greatest play ever written, and the greatest about death in all conceivable aspects. Hold it up to the light, it’s a black diamond reflecting ideas about death and the concomitant unknown. Not as something gloomy in the least, but as something to be considered seriously by people who are alive. I don’t think there’s a scene in Hamlet that doesn’t discuss the thing that happens in the end to every single one of us. The intellectual pre-eminence of Hamlet is unequalled in any drama.

Saint Joan is a sort of rogue play. As Judge Brack says: ‘People don’t do those things’. Holy things don’t usually happen to people. It’s a very unfashionable voyage Joan is taking. Her spiritual largesse is untutored, instinctive, simplistic, faithful, cheeky; Hamlet’s is tortured, sophisticated, poetic, philosophical, funny. They couldn’t be more different.

But we know what Shaw means: he means this is a part that every actress must play. As an individual, Joan haunts us from the sidelines, but she’s not central to our problems. When audiences watch Saint Joan, they’re watching a sainted, blessed, tragic life, and powerfully tragic for being factual, but yet not one with which they can really and truly identify. And I suspect that as secularism informs our national debate more frequently, this play might appear increasingly out on a limb.

Parts for women, compared with those for men, are so few and far between that there are certain touchstone roles. Joan is a great part for a young actress. It’s overtly spiritual unlike any other seminal role; her love affair with God is such an extraordinary one in being so intimate. Others at random – Masha, Sonia, Blanche, Phaedra, Hester, any of the girls in Shakespeare – are all too human, and their involvements are with themselves and the men in their lives. But Saint Joan has one thing in common with another real-life historical person, Cleopatra: both chose death over a compromised life. Hedda does too, but she’s a fiction. Or at least as unfictional as Hamlet has become in the collective unconscious. The only unique aspect that I have to offer in these pages is that I have played in my time two very different Joans.

I was asked by Cedric Messina to do Joan for BBC Television in the Seventies. He was producing lots of major classic plays for the box, which doesn’t happen much these days. In the Sixties, Shakespeare’s Joan – called La Pucelle – was my first part with the Royal Shakespeare Company for its great quatercentenary Wars of the Roses season at Stratford-upon-Avon, conceived by Peter Hall, when John Barton was directing the French sections of Henry VI. By the time I got to Shaw’s Joan, I was ready to pooh-pooh the whole saintly business of it, because I had got taken by the Shakespeare one, so persuasive is he. He’s incapable of writing something that you can’t believe in, at least I find so.

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