Red Noses and Saint Joan

Red Noses and Saint Joan BERNARD F. DUKORE Obviously, a writer may be influenced by another writer whom he admires: Pinter by Beckett, say. Also obviously, a particular play may be influenced by one or more particular works that the author admires: Candida by A Doll's House and The Lady from the Sea, for example. A play may also derive from a work the author detests: Brecht's Baal in conscious reaction to Hanns lohst's Der Einsame, for instance. More difficult to document, usually, is the latter type of indebtedness when the author is unaware of it. During May and June 1985, at the Royal Shakespeare Company's rehearsals of Peter Barnes's Red Noses , which I attended as an observer, 1:00 p.m. signalled the beginning of a luncheon break. Most members of the play's production team usually adjourned to one of the two RSC canteens in its building in the Barbican Centre. On one such occasion, actors swapped stories of boring productions in which they had been involved. One actor told of a production of Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan during his apprentice days, when he had been a supernumerary in the trial scene. The Inquisitor's long speech was so dull that the actors who played the clerical assessors tended to doze off and miss their cues. Shortly before the speech ended, the director gave this young actor thejob of placing documents on the desks of the judges - the real purpose of the business being to whisper to them, while doing the job, that it was time to wake up. To this day, the actor considers SaintJoan an awful play. On that day, Peter Barnes spiritedly agreed. The Inquisitor's speech, he said, was impossibly long and intolerably tedious, loan's supposedly lyrical description of talking to her voices actually poorly written stuff - an exception to Shaw's usual writing and to Barnes's view, as he vividly phrased his overstatement, that "the man was congenitally incapable of writing a poorly turned line." He and the actor agreed that Shaw's best plays were Pygmalion and You Never Call Tell - pure theatre, purely wonderful, and without sermons or long stretches of dialogue (while they were surprised when I reminded them of the long Red Noses and Saint Joan 341 discussion in Act V of Pygmalion, theirjudgment as to the play's merits did not change). The other actors at the table said nothing. On that afternoon, since no actress was present, the view of someone who had played or perhaps wanted to play Joan was unheard. Chiefly because, as observer, any interpretation I might have made of Red Noses would have been to overstep my bounds, I waited until the actors were not present, and Bames and I were alone, to tell him how surprised I was at the views he stated. Was I surprised because I remembered the admiration of Man and Superman and Major Barbara, which he had expressed on previous occasions, he asked, adding that he expected me to mention it when he and the actor were talking oflong speeches? That was only part ofthe matter, I replied; the real reason was thatin some respects RedNoses is his version of SaintJoan. Although he was puzzled at fIrst, it took a single phrase from me to make him recognize, "That's right. I hadn't been aware of it before" - nor, I admitted, had I until he and the actor began to talk about Shaw's play. I said nothing futther, but I watched as the examples raced by silently in his mind and he spoke, aloud, words and phrases like "Yes ... Ofcourse ... That's so." After he satisfied himselfas to the validity ofthe observation, he smiled mischievously , saying, "But I still don't like Saint Joan." In certain important respects, RedNoses constitutes Peter Bames's response to Saint Joan - his own different perspective on similar subject-matter, his alternatives to Shaw's ideas. Despite the differences between the visions of these dramatists, the similarities of the two plays is strong. Slightly more than eighty years separate their dramatic action. Red Noses begins in 1348 (winter in the RSC production, unspecified...