Saint Joan | The Island of Misfit Players
All images: The Island of Misfit Players
Saint Joan is my favourite play of all time, to the point where I have the cover art tattooed on my shin. As such, it’s safe to say that I came into The Island of Misfit Players’ production of Shaw’s opus with some lofty expectations—expectations that were absolutely met. The Island of Misfit Players have approached Saint Joan with a level of respect and earnestness that felt refreshing to me; with no urge to modernise or reimagine the script, what they have achieved is an excellent, straightforward adaptation of the play while still maintaining a very personal stamp on their interpretation.
Running at over two and half hours, Saint Joan is a hefty work, but one that never left me clockwatching. The play runs swiftly, with very little dead air onstage, and the performers never faltered or lost energy at any point. Scenes flow naturally into each other, with assistance from a very effective use of spotlights in combination with the large painted map backdrop to indicate where in France we are at any given time. On this note, the tech and production of Saint Joan is stellar; strong costuming and set design brought me into the period nature of the play comfortably, and the use of sound and score (while minimal) served to further strengthen the work as a whole.
All images: The Island of Misfit Players
While the whole cast is wonderful (I was particularly struck by Thomas Eastwood’s Brian Blessed-esque take on the Earl of Warwick), it’s Tiana Varcoe as the titular Saint Joan who steals the show. Beginning the play with a childlike earnestness, she sells Joan as a young girl who truly believes in her voices, and cannot imagine why others would not. Electric from the moment she steps onstage, I was instantly enamoured by this take on the character, and totally believed that someone this charming could convince an army to follow her. As the play progresses, this naivety is slowly but surely eroded—by the time we reach her sentencing, Varcoe plays Joan as someone who has been beaten down by a system that refuses to let her succeed. Throughout the play, multiple characters attempt to define Joan—she is described as being in love with religion, or with war—but it's in her final moments that it really becomes apparent who she is. Varcoe’s Joan is in love with life; in her penultimate monologue, as she reckons with the cruelty of a life of imprisonment, I found myself beginning to tear up as she described the beauty of her farm, and of the voices she hears carried by the church bells. It felt like Varcoe had a true understanding of Joan as a character, and that understanding was perfectly translated onto the stage.
Saint Joan is, by its nature, something of a tragicomedy; Shaw’s tendencies toward satire and dry comedic repartee are on full display throughout the work, and it is a major part of what makes the script so effective. The Island of Misfit Players have leant into the comedic elements here, evident from the moment Robert de Baudricort chases his steward around a table in a Three Stooges-esque visual gag. While I was surprised by this choice, it ended up really working for me; the cast here are all stellar, and by leaning further into the comedic nature of the script, I bought into the joyous nature of Varcoe’s Joan. It’s a take that gives the work a really strong texture and depth, bringing the words to life in a way that I hadn’t imagined in the many times I’ve read the script.
These choices, however, do create some difficulty in the work’s latter half; scenes in which tension should be at its highest are frequently undercut by the need to maintain creative decisions made in support of the comedic elements of the play, leading to a loss of dramatic tension. One can only take Joan’s sentencing to the stake so seriously when the sentence is delivered with a voice taken straight from Monty Python. While this didn’t totally kill these moments for me, I found myself wondering if there was a more sustainable middle ground that could have been struck, especially with how Varcoe’s performance shifts throughout the runtime.
All in all, I really liked The Island of Misfit Players’ Saint Joan. It feels like a perfect storm of creatives, coming together to create one of the stronger adaptations of a classic that I’ve seen in recent years. I applaud their work in so deftly translating Shaw’s work to the modern stage, and wait with excitement to see what they choose to stage next.
Saint Joan played at Metro Arts from 15-18 October 2025.
