Playing Joan: Actresses on the Challenge of Shaw's Saint Joan [Paperback]

Holly Hill (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group; 1st edition (January 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 093045264X
• ISBN-13: 978-0930452643
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,450,335 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hill is enthusiastic but not a great interviewer, May 9, 1998

By 

Lisa Stumph ([e-mail]) (Marlboro, Vermont) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Playing Joan: Actresses on the Challenge of Shaw's Saint Joan (Paperback)

Playing Joan is a collection of interviews of 26 actresses who have played the character, Joan in different productions of George Bernard Shaw's "Saint Joan." The play itself is about Joan of Arc's leadership of the French army and her eventual death by fire at the stake. In the introduction of the book, Hill explains that she's written the interviews "as if the actress is talking directly to the reader, not as if they were English essays." As such, each essay seems to be a direct transcript of the interview with the interviewer's voice omitted. Hill writes that she chose this style in order "to preserve the individual personalities of the speakers". Logically, this seems to make sense; by reading the actresses' thoughts in their own words-not filtered through the eyes of the interviewer-the reader has direct access to the emotions and personalities of the actresses. In fact, however, this method does not achieve the desired end. (Even if it did, the book was supposed to be about different ways to play the character and not the actresses themselves.)

No matter how hard Hill tries to subtract herself from the equation of the interviews, she is still present. One way her presence is felt is through the questions she asks of the actresses. For example, all the actresses address the idea of Shaw's "Joan" being to them what Shakespeare's "Hamlet" is to male actors. Some of the actresses agree that there is a similarity and some don't, but the fact that they all discuss this point reveals that the question was one that the interviewer thought was important and not that the actresses were particularly concerned with it. In fact, it is fairly obvious that the interviewer asked the same list of questions of all the actresses. Because they are all constricted by the same questions, the reader misses out on the true differences between the reactions to the character; what the actresses themselves thought was important enough to be discussed.

Another means by which the interviewer reveals herself is thro! ugh her editing. Hill must have spent several hours interviewing each actress and consequently, must have had tapes and tapes of raw footage through which to navigate while doing the actually writing. What Hill chose to leave in, what she cut out, and what order she presents the information says more about her own search and her writing style than it does about either the character or the actresses. Each chapter of the book is about a different actress but somehow they all sound the same. This is hard to believe because in actuality, each chapter presents a different person saying different things in different ways with different words. But, because their words have all gone through the same editing process, the chapters may as well be different reactions by the same person.

The list of questions and the editing process work to create a consistency throughout the different chapters which Hill must have felt was important to the cohesiveness of the book. However, these things do not work at all toward revealing the actresses' true feelings about the character nor does it reveal enough about the actresses' individuality for a reader to see them as real people. It seems that Hill has not clearly decided exactly what she wants her book to be about: the character of Joan, the actresses' reactions to the character, the actresses' reactions to specific questions about Joan, the actresses as actresses, or Holly Hill's ideas about Joan. Although Hill has a topic and 26 different views of the subject, she has not put them together in a way that reveals anything about what she says she set out to explore.

Although the book was interesting, it could have been much more so if Hill had admitted that there is no way she can completely erase herself from an interview and, instead of trying to be invisibly (but actually standing between the reader and the actress), she allow the reader to use her as a lens through which to see these actresses as they present themselves. This could have been done through descriptions o! f the actresses' tone of voice, facial expressions, sound of laughter, pace of speech, reaction to the questions before the answer, willingness to be interviewed, etc. Hill admits in the introduction that she wishes that the readers could have seen these things and that they are important to understanding the actresses, but at the same time, her interviewing style and her editing of the transcripts are the things that really keep the reader from "being there" during the interview.

The best way to keep from setting out to answer one question and ending up with answers to another is to not limit oneself in the first place. If Hill had decided to explore actresses' reactions to the character "Joan" instead of looking for answers to a list of questions, and if she had allowed the actresses to talk about what they felt was important, she could have ended up with a fascinating book about what types of actresses are drawn to play the character, actresses' attitudes toward acting, how the actresses' attitudes toward a character, a director, or a company change over time, amusing anecdotes about their particular experiences as Joan, and about the lives, dreams, and fears of the actresses themselves with the character of Joan as the glue that holds it all together.