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The Lark

Written by Jean Anouilh

Adapted by Lillian Hellman

Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg

Starring Graham Abbey, Amanda Plummer and Martha Henry

At the Stratford Festival

Rating: **½

From her execution for witchcraft and heresy in 1431 to her canonization in 1920 to the present day, Joan of Arc continues to fascinate, baffle and polarize historians, artists and politicians in equal measures. Her story has been told and retold in folk tales, songs, plays, books, films, TV movies and, to cite two recent Canadian examples, a puppet show from Sarah Phillips and a stage musical by Vincent de Tourdonnet. Like celebrities though, saints can be overexposed, and Joan is no exception.

Lillian Hellman's 1955 adaptation of Jean Anouilh's The Lark ( L'Alouette) -- which opened Thursday at the Stratford Festival starring Amanda Plummer as Joan -- is more fascinating for how it reconfigures the same story than any new insights into the woman's life. Written shortly after the Second World War, the play is a political parable about collaboration and fanaticism borrowed from the 15th century but retrofitted for the 20th. It's a story of transformations: how a "heretic" became a political symbol, how a medieval woman dressed and acted like a man and how a "lark in the skies of France" became a "giant" bird.

It's not just Joan who's on trial in The Lark. As Cauchon (Bernard Hopkins), one of the clergymen who has surrendered Joan to the British, says: "Time will come when our names will be known only for what we did to her; when men, forgiving their own sins, but angry at ours, will speak our names in a curse." Ever pragmatic, the British officer Warwick (Graham Abbey) acknowledges that "different politics may require different symbols." She who gets burnt at the stake today, Warwick predicts, can have a monument erected in her honour in the future. If there's a final word, only time will tell it.

Making his debut at the Stratford Festival, American stage and screen director Michael Lindsay-Hogg may set The Lark in the 1940s, but he also adds in the program notes that his country is "a tricky place at the moment for anyone who wants to say something against the prevailing opinion." I'm not sure if that makes Michael Moore, Janeane Garofalo or Barbra Streisand the Joans of contemporary America, but the point is valid. Hellman herself adapted the play shortly after she was blacklisted in Hollywood by the House Un-American Activities Committee -- a time of civil-liberties infringement much like today's.

All these political contexts given to The Lark (in its original French, its adaptation or this production) sustain a solid, intelligent, if never truly soaring production. There's an unmistakable air of worthiness here; a gravitas that, even in the production's well-handled humorous outbursts, never loses sight of the historical lesson it wants us to take home and ponder.

The director knows this and so do the performers, who do the kind of respectable jobs on their characters one expects from such Stratford luminaries as Martha Henry as the very grand Inquisitor, Stephen Ouimette as the fanatical Promoter, or Barry MacGregor as Joan's brother in arms Captain La Hire. Only Steven Sutcliffe as Charles, the Dauphin (a cross between an aimless French monarch and a spoiled English brat in the Hugh Grant mode) surprises and thrills. Eugene Lee's set design and Dana Osborne's costumes are effective, simple and facilitate temporal and physical shifts in the production.

Naturally, the weight of the production falls on Plummer's shoulders. This quirky, if highly and deliberately mannered, actor is never less than fascinating to watch but always less than fascinating in the final analysis. The play, with its laboured references to the notions of reenactment and performance, is highly aware of its own theatricality, and Plummer's performance enhances such awareness -- sometimes fittingly and at other times distractingly. She does bring out the mental and physical fragility of Joan with sensitivity: "I don't want to be beaten, I don't want to want. . . . I am scared."

But there's nothing to fear in or of The Lark, even if it hints that the future may replay selected and undesirable passages from the past. Solid, respectable creations are rarely scary or confrontational, no matter what political agenda they peddle. The Stratford box office, where this production is likely to be a hit, will no doubt prove this point, long after my name and this review are forgotten.

The Lark runs at the Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ont., until October 29 (1-800-567-1600).

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