Review - Joan

Luisa Hastings Edge

JOAN

Presented by THE RABBLE and Theatre Works

Co-creators Kate Davis and Emma Valente

Set and Costume Design - Kate Davis

Text/Direction /LX Design / SFX Design – Emma Valente

AV Design – Martyn Coutts

Dramaturg - Leisa Shelton

Production Manager – Rebecca Etchell

Stage Manager and LX and SFX Operator – Ruth Blair

Creative Producer – Josh Wright

Performers:  Luisa Hastings Edge, Emily Milledge, Dana Miltins and Nikki Shiels

20 April - 30 April 2017

Opening with extraordinary multi media projections on scrims, JOAN by the RABBLE, is a work of high art.  It is riveting, hypnotic, haunting and sometimes deeply shocking.  But at all times uncompromisingly designed to insightfully explore a deep feminist response to the now canonized, illiterate peasant, who was ‘the virgin from Orleans.’   Joan of Arc who, in The Middle Ages, led the French into battle with the English, who ultimately burned her at the steak thrice, is the subject of this production.

Dana Miltins and Emily Milledge by David Paterson

Here her story is stripped back to its powerful and profound essence by a courageous affiliation of theatre makers who have previously brought us similarly weighty works such as The Story of O (2013) and Salome (2008).

I strongly advise before seeing this show you read up on Joan of Arc to be able to augment this astonishing ‘black and white’ offering with one’s own understandings, insights and colourful nuances.

Luisa Hastings Edge

The performance at Theatre Works is remarkably finely micro managed.  Lighting, sound, projections (Emma Valente and Martyn Coutts) and the human bodies of performers, Luisa Hastings Edge, Emily Milledge, Dana Miltins and Nikki Shiels work in outstanding synchronicity to produce startlingly crisply timed images.

Costumes by Kate Davis have the capacity to morph suggestively from military uniform to flowing dresses to projection screens of sorts.

Encapsulated here are Joan’s strengths of huge courage and dogged determination, along with her humiliation at the very private becoming excruciatingly public, then her torture and horrific demise.

As a mostly image based work, when text is finally spoken it is acutely and intensely visceral.  All four performers excel in affecting the audience with words but most particularly Nikki Sheils with Emma Valente’s sharp acute text.

It feels like a privilege and honour to be able to attend theatre of this caliber.

Suzanne Sandow

Review - Story of O

Story of O

By THE RABBLE after Pauline Reage

Supported by NEON (Melbourne Theatre Company)

The Lawler Studio – Southbank

June 27 – July 7

Creators – Kate Davis and Emma Valente

Director – Emma Valente

Set & Costume Design – Date Davis

Cast

O – Mary Helen Sassman

Sir Stephen – Jane Montgomery Griffith

Rene  - Gary Abrahams

Jacqueline – Dana Miltins

Anne-Marie – Pier Carthew

Nathalie – Emily Milledge

Actors move around on a sparse stage, set with merry-go-round horses and sprinkled with sand that makes a crunching sound as it is walked on.  This modern reinterpretation, by The Rabble, of the original novel Story of O written by Pauline Reage (Anne Desclos) and published in 1954, is at times, an overwhelmingly visceral experience.

The masochism of being subjected to erotic/pornographic sex is explored from the female perspective.  Mary Helen Sassman plays O, a young woman with a healthy defiance, who throughout is symbolically violated with clinical objectivity - as though such exploits are an imperative and necessary evil.  The unquestioning compliance, with which, the-matter-of fact sex acts are perpetrated, by the other characters, is fascinating.  This disturbing malaise of neutrality allows, the viewer, space for contemplating meaning that is uncluttered by emotional connectivity. 

As O, Sassman tellingly and poignantly portrays the journey of a feisty and strong willed young woman being corroded by voluntary sexual exploitation/victimization.

Emily Milledge is beautifully cast as Nathalie an apparently unquestioning compliant and complicit child like assistant who’s participation in torturous activities implies the self perpetuating unquestioning and cyclic nature of the exploitation of the female body.

The character of Sir Stephen played by Jane Montgomery Griffiths establishes an unstable patriarchal focal point.  Griffith richly and disturbingly embodies this controlling and unlovely male character who initially lectures the audience on the semantics of erotica.

Story of O is a serious work and not for the faint hearted.  Acts of sex and violence such as penetration, restraint and whipping are robustly and graphically, albeit symbolically, enacted. 

Director Emma Valente courageously and rewardingly explores theories of erotica in relation to gender – fulfillment, satiation and annihilation.

It is an intense and rocky ride that has much to recommend it including a hilarious parody on the casting of a classic work that is concurrently running at Melbourne Theatre Company.

(For Stage Whispers)