Holy warrior

Tara Rosling as Joan of Arc in the George Bernard Shaw play Saint Joan, which runs until Oct. 27 at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-On-The-Lake, Ont. (David Cooper/Shaw Festival).

Forensic scientists announced earlier this month that after extensive testing, a rib bone long believed to belong to the incinerated corpse of Joan of Arc came, in fact, from some anonymous Egyptian mummy (the remains of which were a common ingredient in medieval medicine). If it turns out that the French teenage soldier-saint didn’t leave behind any relics, she’s already more than made up for it with an image that continues to permeate world culture. Six centuries after she was burnt at the stake for heresy, and almost 90 years after she was canonized by the Catholic Church, Joan keeps popping up in the most unexpected places, from American prime-time television (Joan of Arcadia) to Japanese anime (d’Arcmon) to computer games to a recent concept album by electronica pioneers Tangerine Dream.

Jackie Maxwell, director of the Shaw Festival’s new production of Saint Joan, now in previews and opening May 9, says she came across an A&E Biography of the holy warrior while preparing for the play. “It was a bit reductive, shall we say!” she remarks, laughing down the phone from her festival office in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. “But nevertheless, it was funny to find her right up there with Britney [Spears] and the rest in terms of TV celebrity.”

The fact is, Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc in French) was an idol eons before the term meant flash-in-the-pan pop-music stardom, and the story of how she led France to victory over its English aggressors during the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) has in the past attracted such artistic heavy-hitters as Shakespeare, Verdi, Mark Twain and Bertolt Brecht. George Bernard Shaw’s 1924 play Saint Joan remains one of the most compelling interpretations of her brief but momentous life, in part because Shaw refused to accept the popular conception of her as a romantic heroine. Rather than an ethereal peasant girl guided by voices, Shaw saw her as a religious radical and a hard-headed harbinger of nationalism. Think of her as a tough, charismatic young leader who claims divine inspiration and is determined to drive invaders from her land, and you might well be talking about certain jihadists at work today in the Middle East.

Given that contemporary resonance, Maxwell, who is also the festival’s artistic director, says Saint Joan was begging for a revival. “Within Joan’s story, the play clearly examines the whole beginnings of the notion of nationalism, which of course has become a major trigger for things happening in the world today,” she observes. “And [Shaw] looks at religious fervour, which is always potent, and today especially so.”

Timely though it is, Maxwell says she wouldn’t have programmed the play this season if she didn’t also have a key component in place: Tara Rosling.

“With Saint Joan, you need an actress who can be a farm girl, but one who talks to saints,” Maxwell says. “You really need someone whose feet are on the earth and whose head is in the sky, who can really present those extremes, and I’ve always felt that Tara could do that.”

Tara Rosling, kneeling, as Joan with members of the cast of Saint Joan. (David Cooper/Shaw Festival)

Rosling says playing Joan has been a long-time goal. The gifted actress, entering her fourth season at Shaw, has seen the role as a raison d’être in times of self-doubt. “Probably a lot of artists have a love/hate relationship with what we do for a living,” Rosling says, “so at one point, when I was contemplating quitting acting for probably the 20th time, my mom said, ‘You can’t. You haven’t played Joan yet!’ For many actresses, it’s one of those great parts, like Antigone – these fiery, idealistic characters where you just want to slip into their skin.”

Rosling’s Joan follows in the big footsteps of such esteemed actresses as Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Wendy Hiller and Siobhan McKenna, not to mention Canadian stage stars Nora McLellan and Mary Haney, who played the saint in the Shaw Festival’s only two previous productions (1981 and 1993, respectively). Joan was only 17 when she set out on her mission to liberate France and officially crown the dauphin, Charles VII, as its king, and 19 when she was captured and executed by the English. Nonetheless, the role demands an experienced actress, not an adolescent. The 30-something Rosling, who has retained a teenage ebullience, has been tapping into it for her performance.

“The first three scenes she’s in, there’s very much that youthful energy, that determined, innocent, child-like naiveté,” Rosling says. “I don’t try to play the age, I just try to capture that energy.” But later on, during the eloquent trial scenes, “there are definitely notes that you have to hit that I certainly wouldn’t have been able to hit as a teenager. I don’t know if I could even hit those notes in my early 20s.”

Rosling says she’s never seen a stage production of Saint Joan, but she’s familiar with the ill-regarded 1957 Hollywood film starring Jean Seberg, and caught the Stratford Festival’s 2005 production of another famous Joan play, Jean Anouilh’s The Lark. To prepare for the part, Rosling spent two weeks in France last fall, visiting the sites of the saint’s triumphs and downfall. That included the city of Orléans, which Joan took back from the English in her most stunning victory; Reims, where she oversaw the coronation of Charles VII; and Rouen, the scene of her trial and death. It was in the saint’s hometown, Domrémy-la-Pucelle, that Rosling felt closest to Joan, who claimed to have heard voices speaking to her when the church bells rang.

“There was, like, this string of medieval villages along the Meuse river,” Rosling says, “and if you’re out in the middle of the country, the bells do ring every quarter hour from all the surrounding villages. And with the mist off the river, it was just like I could truly say God was everywhere there.”

Not to mention capitalism. At each place she visited, Rosling also found a tourist industry capitalizing on the Joan legend. “Orléans is in love with her, [images of her are] all over the city. And in Rouen, there’s a wooden pillar erected where she was burned. They sell plastic statues of her everywhere.”

Joan’s iconic status has informed Maxwell’s production, which emphasizes the context in which Shaw wrote the play – a few years after the saint’s 1920 canonization and in the aftermath of the First World War. Maxwell discovered that French soldiers defending their homeland from the German invaders carried images of Joan into the trenches. Nor did her exploits exclusively inspire the French. “They used her in North America, too,” Maxwell says. “There are all these fabulous posters using her to sell war bonds.”

Her sainthood and Shaw’s play heralded a huge 20th-century interest in Joan, which has yet to wane in the 21st – witness that putative rib. And Shaw’s version of her, convincing as it is, is hardly the last word on her character. Rosling says that her host in Domrémy-la-Pucelle had some opinions of his own on Joan. “He bought into the theory that she was descended from nobility and that she was literate, and the voices she heard were a romanticized version of the truth. And he went further to say she was big for a woman and was, in fact, a hermaphrodite!” Rosling bursts into laughter. “I was like, ‘That’s very fascinating, but I don’t know if I can play that – it’s not really in Shaw’s script.’”

Saint Joan is now in previews, opens May 9 and runs until Oct. 27 at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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