Joan of Arc will be portrayed as a gender-neutral character in a new play at the home of Shakespeare in London, in a radical departure from the usual depiction of the historic figure.
Audiences for I, Joan, which will open on August 25 at the Globe and run for two months, will hear Joan use the pronouns “they” and “them”.
The play is described by the theatre as “alive, queer and full of hope”. It will chart Joan’s rise during the Hundred Years’ War between the French and English. Isobel Thom will take on the title role in her first big theatrical role.
Michelle Terry, the Globe’s artistic director, said that it was not the first production to represent Joan of Arc as non-binary and referred to the Oxford English Dictionary, saying it used the word “they” to refer to a singular person as early as 1375.
She said: “Theatres do not deal with a historical reality. Theatres produce plays, and in plays, anything can be possible.”
Joan of Arc, who is thought to have been 19 when she was killed in 1431, has inspired musical, artistic and dramatic works since she was burnt at the stake. She was convicted as a heretic when she was captured by the English. She was made a saint by the Roman Catholic Church in 1920.
Terry added that England’s most famous playwright would have approved of the depiction: “Shakespeare did not write historically accurate plays. He took figures of the past to ask questions about the world around him.
“Our writers of today are doing no different whether that’s looking at Ann Boleyn, Nell Gwynn, Aemilia Bassano, Edward II or Joan of Arc. The Globe is a place of imagination. A place where, for a brief amount of time, we can at least consider the possibility of worlds elsewhere.
“We have had entire storms take place on stage, the sinking of ships, twins who look nothing alike being believable, and even a Queen of the fairies falling in love with a donkey.”
After joining the Globe in 2018, Terry presided over two shows that were cast as “gender blind”, which meant men and women could play roles normally depicted by members of the opposite sex.
Terry herself played Hamlet in 2018, and Catrin Aaron stepped into the role of Horatio. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night features Viola, a character who walks the line between male and female genders.
Charlie Josephine, the non-binary writer of the play, said: “Joan was this working-class, young person, who was transgressing gender at a time when it was really dangerous and that just felt instantly relatable to me.”
However, one academic has said that the play risked “rewriting history”. Frank Furedi, an emeritus professor at the University of Kent, said the play was “projecting of a fantasy backwards”.
He added: “Someone like Joan of Arc would not have any idea what non-binary was. It is a recharacterisation of something that did not even exist at the time.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/gender-neutral-joan-of-arc-at-globe-qn5thkz5n (Archive)
