Famous Lovers: A Saint Valentine's Event

Get ready for a fun-filled night celebrating love and great causes! Join us in person for the Famous Lovers party – where romance meets a fantastic fundraiser for Saint Joan. Expect glamour, drinks, a concert featuring famous love song, poetry and friends. Don’t miss out on this unique Saint Valentine's event for the benefit of 'Saint Joan' a new play!

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Directed by Governor General Award Recipient Peter Hinton, this new production of Saint Joan is produced by Ruthie Black & James Saxby.

Our Saint Joan distils Shaw’s four-hour epic to a taut ninety minutes. The twenty odd characters who inhabit the original play are performed by two actors (simply identified as Joan and The Interrogator) and, in an imagined modern interrogation room, Joan’s life and encounters, miracles and trials are enacted. The six scenes of Shaw’s play are represented through concentrating each scene to its central interview or interrogation. The Epilogue is used as a containing structure for the whole, and what results is a kind of dream-play; one that holds the realism of a court of justice and another that depicts the spiritual mystery of a haunting or a vision. The performance will be in modern dress – and performed with live video. The video, of course embodies the realities of police interrogations, but also manifests the themes of surveillance and confession in the text. Sometimes court-room reality documentary, sometimes confessional TikTok – sometimes a movie playing in their minds; the effect is both at once a live play and film.

Shaw believed in a ‘radical individualism’ as a high value in which theatre should be liberated. The two prevailing themes in Shaw’s theatre are: first, a rallying cry to reject the humbug of conventional thought – and secondly, a call to re-invent a new morality for the current time. The politics of Saint Joan, prove shockingly relevant to our modern world, and point to necessary questions about religion, war and nationhood. His politics are manifested in the rottenness of institutional life, the failures of liberal democracy, and the pervasive reach of religious opportunism. There are no easy solutions.

Shaw’s responsibility, above all was to make the audience speculate. In Shaw’s theatre the writer and the actor work together to lead the audience into new terrain that has not been visited before. This is the challenge. Is Saint Joan an argument against the war, or for it? Is Joan a pawn in a political alliance or a revolutionary? There is no common ground for the reception of the play. Each individual draws their own conclusion.

The new theatre Shaw called for in 1923 is one which rejected conventional politics or ideology. Shaw’s way as a dramatist is always to expose the public crisis through the personal agony of the individual. So, if a writer was to achieve real change, the audience was encouraged to begin some form of moral reconstruction themselves. Consequently, what is achieved is achieved individually not collectively, there is no official singular interpretation. As British playwright Howard Barker, (a Shavian himself in this regard), said, “If there’s 200 people in a theatre, watching a play, there are 200 different reactions.” This debate is what makes Saint Joan a great play. This is perhaps what makes it worth reviving; it is always in pursuit of finding new things and gleaning the uncomfortable truths.

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Host or Publisher Peter Reynolds, Fiona Ferguson, James Reynolds & Ruthie Black