The Bristol Old Vic Young Company has taken on a formidable challenge in presenting Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards. This play originated as a much modified version of an unsuccessful Brecht-Weill musical called Happy End, and given Brecht’s well-known political views it comes as no surprise that its central theme is capitalism’s ruthless exploitation of the poor. A little more controversially, the play also accuses charitable religious groups of being equally guilty of exploitation.
Many of Brecht’s familiar ‘alienation’ techniques are employed to ensure that we do not become too emotionally involved in the plight of individual fictional characters but can instead distance ourselves sufficiently to reflect on the real-world issues under discussion. In director Nik Partridge’s slimmed-down version of the sprawling original these techniques include very effective passages of choreographed mime, occasional songs, and sequences when the cast step out of character to offer commentary on the narrative. We are kept fully aware that we are in a theatre by a starkly functional set design by Rosanna Vize that eschews any attempt to represent a specific location.
St Joan of the Stockyards is set in the meat-packing district of Chicago, and the unacceptable face of capitalism is represented by Pierpont Mauler, a ruthlessly manipulative businessman. Do-gooding religiosity is represented by Joan Dark, an earnest member of the ‘Black Straw Hats’ – think Salvation Army in boaters. She sympathises with the poor, condemning their employers’ ‘machinations and oily tricks’, but she offers them no escape from poverty in this life, only salvation after death.
Joshua Robinson is very impressive as Mauler, not least because he succeeds in investing Brecht’s two-dimensional caricature of a money-making monster with a degree of humanity and depth. Kate Alhadeff is outstanding as Joan Dark, the Black Straw Hat who finds herself rejected by those she has tried to help. Her bungled intervention in an industrial dispute prevents the violent revolution that is needed to break the system. Brecht fails to make it clear whether Joan is true saint, a turncoat, or merely a naïve young woman out of her depth, so it is a tribute to Alhadeff’s sensitive performance that she makes this frustratingly ill-defined character very watchable. Monica Silkenas is equally impressive as Snyder, the coldly calculating leader of the Black Straw Hats who realizes that a workers’ revolution would not be in her interest, as the downtrodden poor are the Black Straw Hats’ raison d’être. There are other notably strong performances from Julia Head as Cridle, the owner of a meat-packing plant, from Jack Orozco Morrison as Mauler’s broker, and from Matt Landau, as one of Mauler’s business rivals. Indeed, the entire cast deserves a great deal of credit for turning what could be a rather dry, polemical exercise into a piece of lively theatre.
Having said that, I think it is clear why St Joan of the Stockyards has seldom been revived. At one point Joan steps out of character to exclaim, ‘I don’t know what’s going on in this play anymore!’ and I suspect that many in the audience will feel the same, for the ‘oily machinations’ of the businessmen are presented in a bewilderingly complex fashion. Brecht appears to have recognized this, for there is a rather amusing sequence in the second half where the cast step out of character to summarise the plot so far and then give us a brief lesson on the workings of market forces. This is a play that unashamedly wears its didacticism on its sleeve, and there are many times when the script is overly declamatory, too much like soap-box oratory. It lacks the strong narrative line of, say, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and its emotional range is rather limited. I greatly admired Nik Partridge’s imaginative direction and I really liked the percussive mechanistic music Ben Osborn has written for the mimed depictions of the workers’ daily grind. Most of all I enjoyed the skill, energy and commitment of the young actors, but I couldn’t help feeling that they deserved a better play with which to demonstrate their considerable talents. ★★★☆☆ Mike Whitton 15th January 2015
