End of London

[selenak]

Back in Germany, dead exhausted. In a good way; it was a great week. After working in the British Library, I treated myself to the absolutely gorgeous exhibition there, Sacred, which presents basically the holy books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam through the centuries. Now of course I had seen numerous medieval bibles before - and beautiful they were - and even the occasional Talmud, but never before so many Qu'rans, ranging from editions like the one penned for Sultan Baybar which has just six words written in gold per page to handy Qu'rans made of and written on leather so you could carry them in the saddle bag. The exhibition might as well have been subtitled "people of the book", because that Muslim description of the the other two Abrahamic faiths sums it up for all three there. And no matter whether New Testament, Thora or Qu'ran, standing there, looking at those books that must have taken decades to create, each letter painted so carefully, one felt awed and silenced by both labour and beauty.

On a more chatty note, I had a delightful lunch with londonkds, and we geeked out afterwards in the sun; this week has been something of a mini convention to me, only with one friend at a time instead of all of them at the same time. But I need to make introductions the next time; living in the same city as they do, they need to meet each other!

My last theatre treat was Saint Joan at the National Theatre, with Anne-Marie Duff in the title role. It's my favourite Shaw play, and so I was both gratified it was sold out (I think I got the last ticket) a few days earlier when I bought it) and somewhat nervous (what will they do with it?). It was performend in the Olivier, where I had seen Sophocles' two Oedipus plays - which was an amazing experience, especially since the Olivier is build somewhat like a Greek amphitheatre - and Macbeth with Derek Jacobi as Macbeth and some noneentity, sadly, as Lady M (it's a curse - other than dream team Ian McKellen/Judi Dench on video, I never ever saw a Macbeth with both M and Lady M played by great actors). They went for minimum scenery (basically just chairs and flags) and a mixture of present day and vaguely historical costume (the inevitable armour for Joan, mainly). Acting-wise, it was good, with one reservation I had about Anne-Marie Duff - as long as Joan was still ascendant and got her way, she was a bit one-note and too high strung for my taste, and I kept wondering where she would go from there, considering what was to follow; but after the interval, from her fallout scene after the coronation at Reims onwards, she was great. The two crucial scenes, which must be fiendishly difficult for an actress - the trial scene in which she finally does recant only to recant her recantation when she sees it will only give her a life time in prison, and the end of the epilogue were incredibly intense. She played Joan's breakdown so painfully real, not quieter and quieter as I had seen it done before but with cries and sobs that really made you believe this was a woman a) who had been imprisoned for months and b) in fear of her life; and yet you also completely believed her when she went from there to "light your fires". The horror of imprisonment, the horror of death in flames; I can't think of another production which pulled that of.

In the program, one of the essays makes the caustic comment that Joan today would wear the red of a Guantanamo prisoner; our Regietheater being that it is, you can bet she would have done in a German production. The Brits didn't go there, presumably trusting the audience to make their own uncomfortable analogies, and thus remained more universal.) Stogumber's breakdown after Joan's burning when faced with the reality of her death as opposed to the bloodthirsty rethoric and Cauchon's question - "does a Christ have to die in every generation for those of too little imagination" rarely have so resonated.

I'm in two minds about what they did with the epilogue; they basically cut it down to the characters in it saying what happened to them post-trial, left the interaction between them and Joan out altogether (until the very final one), along with the English soldier and the visitor from 1920, and gave the announcement of Joan's canonization to Brother Martin. However, from then onwards we did get the rest of the epilogue, and the bit which is the crucial point; everyone praising Joan, Joan's "woe to me if all men praise me" (which Michael Holyrood appropriately observed is very much old GBS talking about himself, too) and offer to return from the dead, everyone turning away in horror at the prospect, and Joan's final question, which was as powerful as in every other version of the play I've seen and heard: "O god that madest this beautiful earth ,when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, o lord, how long?"

The reason why I'm in two minds about the cuts: on the one hand, they didn't take a way the core of the epilogue, so I'm good with it, on the other, they did take away something that's important - to me, at least - about the play, something of its, in lack of a better term, Shavian dimension. The going from the horror of Joan's death to the chit-chat in Charles' dream only gradually turning into the haunting final point is so very GBS; the Shaw version of a tragedy is still wonderfully witty, after all, and to make the epilogue bleak-only is to make it more of a classical play than he ever wanted to write.

Ah well. Otherwise, I was gratified to see the gags worked as reliably as ever, many decades after Shaw wrote them. The big discussion between Warwick and Cauchon, with Stogumber as the occasional third, is pure talk, pure debate, no action, and if it's not one of the most riveting and funny scenes of the play, you're doing something wrong. They got it right. (And I was very amused how many people in the interval which immediately followed that scene referred to Shaw being Irish in their conversation; though maybe they're right, maybe you have to be Irish to make as relentlessly fun of English nationalism (with Stogumber's English patriotism being the comic mirror of Joan's French one) as Shaw does.)

I'm not sure GBS would have approved of them actually showing - well, miming - the burning. It did work for me, but I also remembered the fact that the play doesn't show Joan's death as written was one thing T.E. Lawrence argued, letter-wise, with Charlotte Shaw and thus by proxy with GBS about. Lawrence was friends with the Shaws at that point and Holyrood argues, not implausibly, that Shaw used some of his characteristics for Joan. He got sent an advance manuscript of the play and loved it. After praising it to the skies, he came to his one cricticism, which was: "It was good to make her sign that confession... and then she died, 'off'. I have a prejudice against the writer who leaves the reader to make his top-scene for him. I funked it, in the deaht of Farraj, faced it, in the plain narrative of my mishaps in Deraa the night I was captured. Here in St. Joan the climax will be the red light shining from the courtyard. It's indirect art and direct shirking. Of course if he'd dipped his pen in all his strenght and written straight forward the play could never have been presented: but the more honour so. I twould have cleaned us all to have seen Joan die."

(Charlotte Shaw wrote back, not surprisingly disagreeing, and got in return an autobiographical confession: "The trial scene in Joan. Poor Joan, I was thinking of her as a person, not as a moral lesson. The pain meant more to her than the example. You instance my night in Deraa. Well, I'm always afraid of being hurt: and to me, while I live, the force of that night will lie in the agony which broke me, and made me surrender. It's the individual view. You can't share it. About that night. I shouldn't tell you, because decent men don't talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book, and wrestled for days wiht my self-respect... which wouldn't, hasn't, let me. For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from a pain which drove me mad, I vae away the only possession we are born into the world with - our bodily integrity. It's an unforgivable matter, an irrrecoverable position; and it's that which has made me forswear decent living. You may call this mordbid: but think of the offence, and the intensity of my brooding over it for these years. It will hang about me while I live, and afterwards if our personality survives. Consider wandering among the decent ghosts hereafter, crying, 'Unclean, unclean!'" The sting of the burning was very big in Joan and GBS would have made his play impossible by portraying it.. Yet if the play was to be not a morality but life itself, he would have given the physical its place above the moral." )

Today was travel back day; and for the first time since last I was in the US, I had to remove my shoes again. Note to self: be grateful you wore socks. I wouldn't want to go barefeet on that ground at Heahtrow...