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New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Marianne Elliott.
Cast: Anne-Marie Duff, Oliver Ford Davies, Jamie Ballard, Finn Caldwell, Jonathan Jaynes, Paterson Joseph, Gareth Kennerley, William Osborne, Paul Ready, Michael Thomas, Luck Treadaway, Ross Waiton, Angus Wright
Description: A historical drama by Bernard Shaw, about the confident teenage girl, defiant in her destiny to purge France of the English and to crown the Dauphin. Directed by Marianne Elliott.
Trains: Tube/BR: Waterloo 
Phone: 0207452 3000
Website: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/?lid=1541
Fury and fear: Anne-Marie Duff scales the risky heights of pathos as Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan
Theatrical blaze: Joan's outbursts look painfully real
The whirligig of time and politics has brought renewed and terrible relevance to Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. No 20th century British play better demonstrates the dangers and intolerances of religious fundamentalism, its abiding threat to liberal ideas of individual freedom.
Some people may latch on to the idea that Joan, compared by Shaw with a Mahometan, ranks as religious martyr and fanatic, who dies because she heeds voices that command her to expel British troops from France. Such a sensational view of the Maid - as a thoroughly modern terrorist - does not explain the play's contemporary importance.
This is the heart of the matter. The trial scene, despite the ornamental extravagances of Marianne Elliott's production, marks one of the great, unequal contests in modern theatre.
Shaw pits Anne-Marie Duff's flayed, pathetic and heart-rending Joan, insistent on her direct line to God, against an Inquisitorial Catholic Church, for whom Oliver Ford Davies's frostily grand but over-rhetorical Inquisitor intones the rules of uniformity.
The Church denies the doomed girl any right to personal conscience. She must ignore the dangerous voices she hears. To do otherwise would make her a heretic and Protestant. Like Martin Luther, this woman in male warrior's armour believes to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. She struggles, centuries before Enlightenment, against the Church's discipline.
She dies for her religious individualism and in a brilliant stroke of theatrical invention Elliott makes the crucial point that religious intolerance remains alive and well today: the production ends by reprising the first scene's opening moments, as if to say Saint Joan's dilemma is ours.
Duff, whose Joan scales the risky heights of pathos and vaults her to the forefront of her acting generation, makes this battle of religious wills fascinating. Slight of physique, androgynous, and Irish accented she conveys Joan's fatal combination of intensity and ardour, assurance and vulnerability. No wonder she inspires Paul Ready's ridiculously down-market, queeny Dauphin and Christopher Colquhoun's dull Dunois.
After Angus Wright's superbly languid, drawling Earl of Warwick has condemned the Maid as an ideological threat to the English nobility, this Joan appears in the trial scene, dazzled by spotlights and surrounded by menacing clerics.
Her outbursts of fury and fear look painfully real.
The production itself, though, in Elliott's ponderous, mainly-modern dress and silver coffee pots rendition, irritatingly harks back to Sixties experimental theatre.
The first burst of Jocelyn Pook's music, in international bursts of World Chill - from Gregorian chant to Gaelic lament - introduces us to stylised, slow-motion actors.
These performers hand each other chairs to arrange around Rae Smith's square, mobile, elevated stage. They remain a distracting presence with their fussy chair arrangements, never more so than in Elliott's bathetic interpolation of an immolation scene.
Joan is strapped at the top of a pile of chairs, there to burn, to soulful musical lament. Yet the play itself stokes up a genuine theatrical blaze.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
This play moved me like no other has! At a time, such as now when the questions posed by Shaw through Saint Joan are more poignant than ever, I was stunned by its relevance to today’s society. The production was dramatic without being gratuitous, willful and vulnerable with an honesty, portrayed using Brectian techniques, drawing out the modernity in this production which made it even more relevant to the current audience. Individual performances within the cast were perfectly balanced and executed to provide a heightened and yet realistic portrayal of a tragic piece of history. Moments of hysteria from the magnificent battle scene to the chaos of the minds and situations following Joan are clearly portrayed using strains of humanity in relationships and brutal honesty in the depictation of history. This production, although not entirely faithful to Shaw's original text explores the fairness and humanity of the real political figure and religious icon that Joan has become.
- Fleur Lagunowitsch-Thomas, London
I'd like to hear about a play illustrating the "dangers and intolerances" of modern thought against Christianity - particularly Catholicism. It's sad that anti-Christian bigotry is alive and well in the world today. If "religious intolerance remains alive and well today" as the writer claims then anti-religious intolerance remains even moreso.
- Tim, Minnesota, USA
