Robin Hood, dir. O. Bathurst (2018)

Robbing the Hood:

Robin Hood, directed by Otto Bathurst, 2018.

Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty

La Salle University

harty@lasalle.edu

The legend of Robin Hood celebrates transgressive behavior.  King Arthur is authoritarian—the focus of a structured legend rooted in long foundational medieval texts by the likes of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, and Sir Thomas Malory.  Robin Hood is anti-authoritarian—the focus of an unstructured legend rooted in popular culture and shorter anonymous texts.  In literature, the Hoodian legend begins as what Roman Catholics used to call an occasion of sin.  In the B-text of Piers Plowman, William Langland in the late fourteenth century presents an idle priest, a figure of sloth, who has failed to learn his prayers but who knows instead the “rymes of Robin Hood.”  Those “rymes” mark the literary beginning of a legend that would grow by bits and bobs and cross genres for centuries, adding along the way characters and incidents with which we have become more than familiar, and, at one point, resituating itself in the time of King Richard I, some two hundred or so years earlier than when it sprang up.

Film began its fascination with Robin Hood at least as early as 1908; television, in 1950 in the United States, and three years later in England.  Rarely, it is safe to say, no matter what genre or media is employed, does someone retell the story of Robin Hood without nodding to earlier versions of the tale and to contemporary politics.  In the case of cinema, arguably the three best Robin Hood films react to world conflicts past (the 1922 Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.), present (Richard Lester’s 1976 Robin and Marian starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn), and future (the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn).  The Robin Hoods of television have similarly been used for political purposes: opposing the Hollywood Blacklist (the 1950s’ The Adventures of Robin Hood), opposing pollution and attacks on the environment (the 1980s’ Robin of Sherwood), and opposing the policies of Mrs. Thatcher (the 1990s’ Maid Marian and Her Merry Men).

Film’s latest foray into the Greenwood—Otto Bathurst’s 2018 Robin Hood—nods to earlier versions of the legend and to contemporary politics.  We have some of the usual suspects—Marian, Little John, Friar Tuck, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Guy of Gisborne, Will Scarlet (identified in the final rolling credits as Will Tillerman).   Prince John, Queen Eleanor, and King Richard, along with a number of the usual merry men, are AWOL.  Parts of the plot seem familiar enough.  The Sheriff, here in cahoots with the Church, is taxing people to death.  Robin is intent on stopping him.  Robin’s weapon of choice is a bow and arrow—his archery skills unmatched.  But as familiar as all this may sound, the film as a whole takes a decidedly different course with already well-known Hoodian naremes, and not with total success.  Indeed, it is fair to say of the film that its whole is not greater than the sum of its parts.

As the film opens, Robin of Loxley (Taran Eggerton) is leading a devil may care life comfortably ensconced in ancestral family home.  He stumbles on a horse thief, the not very well disguised Marian (Eve Hewson), who advocates a sort of income-inequality-is-bad philosophy light.  Marian’s costumer designer for this scene seems to have decided for some unknown reason that she needs to display as much of her breasts as it is possible to do so.  To be fair, the camera’s cinematic gaze here knows no gender prejudices.  Later in the film, Robin is wounded in the thigh by an arrow but must remove his shirt, and thereby display his twelve pack, to receive treatment.

In this Hoodian cinematic enterprise, Nottingham seems at the center of all things England, as the Crusades are being waged off in the East and need conscripts, so Robin receives, in a wonderfully retro scene, what else but a draft notice, duly signed by the Sheriff (a wonderfully dastardly Ben Mendelson).  But that notice sends Robin off not to the Holy Land but to the Arabian Peninsula, where there are medieval versions of weapons of mass destruction (a Gatling gun-like weapon that fire arrows), snipers (Arab and English), and extra-judicial killings of POWs (Abu Ghraib meets My Lai) under the command of Gisborne (Paul Anderson, who will later return to England as a member of a medieval Black Ops team).  A wounded Robin, who has challenged Gisborne’s actions, is shipped back home after having been away from Nottingham for two years, accompanied by the film’s version of Little John (Jamie Foxx, playing an Arab who has watched his son be killed by Gisborne).  Ever since Kevin Reynold’s 1991 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, we have come to expect that Robin will have a Muslim sidekick, though here Foxx merges the 1991 Morgan Freeman role of Azeem with the character of one of the Hoodian legend’s original merry men.

While Robin has been away, all has not been well at Loxley Hall.  Indeed, the Sheriff has declared Robin dead and confiscated his lands.  Marian, who had pledged undying love to Robin when he set out on Crusade, has found consolation in the arms of Will (Jamie Dornan, late of The Fifty Shades of Grey franchise who, in a wonderful visual joke, only wears grey costumes throughout the film).  Dornan’s Will is some sort of labor organizer as Nottingham is not only the center of all things England, but the city also sits atop a huge mine into which workers are sent at their peril.  Exactly what is being mined is unclear, but the working conditions seem to have been inspired by those in any number of sci-fi intergalactic prison films (think Judge Dredd).

The Sheriff is intent upon exploiting the citizens of Nottingham to raise as much money as possible, supposedly for the Crusade. In his endeavors, he is aided and abetted by the local clergy who attach themselves to a huge cathedral that seems the center piece of Nottingham, though the cathedral doesn’t look all that medieval, nor do the costumes of the clergy, of the Sheriff, or of the other characters in the film.  My guess is that the Sheriff shops at Kenneth Cole; Robin, at Alexander McQueen; and Will, at Abercrombie & Fitch.  Even Friar Tuck (Tim Minchin), who functions as an agent provocateur within the church, sports a bright green tunic, which seems as far removed as possible from what we might expect for a medieval clerical habit—the same is true of the costumes of his clerical superiors.  Indeed, the film’s costumes and the sets are at times designed consciously not to be medieval.  The costumes in particular remind me of the wonderful exhibit last year at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art called Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic, which displayed papal regalia along side nearly 150 contemporary ensembles inspired by them.  The film’s costumes resemble the contemporary ensembles more than they do the vestments which inspired them. And Nottingham Cathedral seems modelled on the Temple of the High Sparrow from Game of Thrones more than on any genuinely Romanesque or Gothic structure.

Tuck, Will, Marian, and Robin are convinced that the Sheriff is up to no good—when is he ever in a Hoodian narrative up to anything but no good?—but the Sheriff’s aims and motivation escape them, so Robin pretends to ally himself with the Sheriff against the peasants who in the film are—bad pun à la Mel Brooks coming here—always revolting.  We soon learn the Sheriff was an orphan cruelly reared by abusive clergy—nod here to the ongoing clerical abuse scandal involving the Catholic Church—but he himself is the creature of the film’s true villain simply called the Cardinal (played by an oleaginous, snarling F. Murray Abraham).  What the two are up to is raising great amounts of money to support the Arab efforts in the Middle East, so that, once the Arabs win, the Cardinal can basically rule the world with the Sheriff at his side.

Robin, after some training by Little John in a sequence that nods to, of all cinematic predecessors, Rocky, then springs into action to defeat the Sheriff and the Cardinal—Will advocates a less confrontational response, which only exacerbates the tension between Robin and Will over the affections of Marian.  Robin, Tuck, and Marian manage to hide all the wealth that the Cardinal and Sheriff have accumulated in Sherwood, but Will becomes a casualty in the final battle. Wounded and horribly disfigured, he appears in the film’s final scene as the Sheriff’s new sidekick intent upon opposing everything we previously advocated, think Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight.

As I indicated earlier, this latest Hoodian film is, in the final analysis, less than the sum of its parts.  The film’s opening and closing graphics are borrowed from Arrow, the popular Hoodian television series on the CW channel. Familiar characters appear in unfamiliar situations—not unheard of in previous Hoodian films.  Bathurst’s film gives us Robin Hood before he took to Sherwood and began to rob from the rich and give to the poor—but so did the last Robin Hood film, Riley Scott’s 2010 Robin Hood with Russell Crowe in the title role, and Cate Blanchett as a Marian modelled, it would seem, on Ingrid Bergman’s Joan of Arc in Victor Fleming’s 1948 film. Throughout the 2018 film, there are nods to earlier films, Hoodian and otherwise.  Contemporary political and social issues get thrown into the mix higgledy-piggledy.  Bathurst’s film even presents a Hoodian bad-boy parallel to the King Arthur whom we had from Guy Ritchie in his 2017 film, and, like King Arthur, it was clearly filmed with a series of sequels in mind—in neither case, however, will such sequels be forthcoming, so badly have both films tanked at the box office.  But to be fair, the Ritchie film offers a fresh take on the Arthuriad, as I have argued earlier in Medievally Speaking, and deserves a better critical reception and more appreciation than it has received.  The same can’t be said for Bathurst’s film—here the legend of Robin Hood gets robbed!

Robin Hood, directed by Otto Bathurst. Screenplay by Ben Chandler and David James Kelly.  Summit Entertainment, Appian Way, Pixoloid Studios, Safehouse Pictures, and Thunder Road Pictures. 2018.  Running time: 1:56.

Outlaw King

Beam Me Up, Robbie!: Outlaw King, directed by David Mackenzie

Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University, harty@lasalle.edu

A Saturday Night Live skit last year poked fun at the confusion over the current profusion of young actors with the first name Chris.  There are Chris Evans (Captain America), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Chris Pratt (the Jurassic dinosaur guy), and Chris Pine (the young James Tiberius Kirk from Star Trek). And it is Pine who has traded in his journey into the future to galaxies far, far away for a journey into the past to a medieval Scotland in seemingly endless conflict with England—though thanks to Brexit, that conflict continues, albeit decidedly less bloodily so than in the film, today. In Outlaw King, Pine plays the often-embattled Robert the Bruce (1274-1329) who reigned, at times uneasily, as King of the Scots from 1306 until his death.

             

Outlaw King, now running almost 30 minutes shorter than it did in its original festival release, must at least in passing deal with another famous Scottish thistle in the side of the English, William Wallace (1270-1305), whose life Mel Gibson brought, with considerable historical license, to the screen in the 1995 film Braveheart.  Wallace defeated an English army at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in September 1297, and was then briefly Governor of Scotland.  His defeat at the Battle of Fallkirk in July 1298 forced him to go into hiding until his capture in 1305.  Wallace, or at least his severed left arm, makes a brief appearance in Outlaw King.  His execution—vividly recreated by Gibson, who in Braveheart dies screaming “Freedom!”—was notably gruesome even by medieval standards.  He was first hanged, but cut down while he was still alive. He was then castrated and eviscerated, and had his bowels burned before him. Finally, he was drawn and quartered, and beheaded. His head was put on a pike atop London Bridge, and his severed limbs were then separately sent to be displayed throughout Scotland as a warning to any other would-be rebels of the wrath of England’s Edward I.  And, in Outlaw King, the public display of Wallace’s severed arm as a warning and threat leads to yet another Scottish rebellion, now under the initially reluctant leadership of Robert the Bruce.

[Left: Mel Gibson as William Wallace in Braveheart]

Wallace’s cause was also Robert’s—the two were briefly allied.  In 1290, succession to the Scottish throne became a cause of continuing conflict, as there was no clear claimant to that throne after the death of King Alexander III and then that of his heir and granddaughter, Margaret, Maid of Norway, herself only a child.  With their country on the brink of civil war, the Scottish nobles and clans invited England’s Edward I to come north to settle the matter.  Edward’s solution was to declare himself ruler of Scotland, and the Scots soon rose in a series of rebellions against his increasingly tyrannical rule.  Outlaw King opens in 1302 with Robert the Bruce repledging fealty to Edward I (Stephen Dillane), and receiving in return royal forgiveness for his previous rebellious activities and the hand of the daughter of the Earl of Ulster, Elizabeth de Burgh (Florence Pugh), in a politically advantageous marriage—Robert’s first wife having died in childbirth. In addition, Edward, somewhat unconvincingly, promises to recognize the Bruce claim to the Scottish throne, though John Comyn (Callan Mulvey), long a rival to the Bruces, also advances his in many ways more legitimate familial claim to the same throne.  

The death of Robert’s father (James Cosmo), who had fought with Edward on crusade in the Holy Land, leaves the younger Bruce with second thoughts about how much Edward is to be trusted.  Comyn agrees to meet Robert, but when he learns of the latter’s plans to mount a revolt against Edward, Comyn reasserts his allegiance to Edward and promises to betray Robert.  In a moment of pique, Robert kills Comyn, and after some ecclesiastical hair splitting about how sacrilegious the murder actually may be since it takes place in an abbey church, the bishops of Scotland rush Robert to Scone to be crowned King of the Scots. Edward soon enough defeats the Scots under Robert’s rule, and Robert takes to land and sea to escape the English, until 1307 when, thanks to his use of especially brutal guerilla tactics, Robert manages to defeat a much larger English army, now led by Edward II (Billy Howle), at Loudoun Hill. The film ends with that battle. 

In 1314, at the more important Battle of Bannockburn, Robert would defeat an even larger English army led by Edward II, and thereby ensure Scottish independence, though peace between Scotland and England was not finally established until 1327 under Edward III.  Of course, Robert’s descendants would three centuries later ascend the English throne after the death of Queen Elizabeth I.  At times, history can be nothing short of ironic.

Directed by David Matthews, from an original screenplay which he co-wrote, Outlaw King is only the latest example of what I have called “the reel Middle Ages,” films that bring the medieval to life with varying degrees of historical accuracy, and with sometimes radically different cultural agendas.  Pine broods well, but doesn’t quite have the gravitas necessary to be an epic film hero, nor, in the film, to rally the fractious Scottish clans to his cause—he meets with indifference and betrayal as he crisscrosses Scotland in an attempt to raise an army. 

Indeed, Robert’s wife outshines him initially when she stands up to the English who are about to conscript a mere boy into Edward’s army.  Robert had counseled patience, not boldness.  Dillane’s Edward I seems less threatening and villainous than Patrick McGoohan’s in Braveheart, though Howle’s Edward II is decidedly less effeminate and more dangerous than Peter Hanly’s in the Gibson film.  Indeed, Howle’s Edward II is totally mad, and clearly bent on outdoing his father’s cruelty.  When he marches north, he unleashes “the dragon,” thereby eschewing the laws of chivalry and giving his troops a free hand to adopt whatever military tactics they want.  Scottish women are shipped off to England to become servants and sexual playthings; men and boys are summarily executed wherever they are captured.

In Outlaw King, the English have long lost their patience with the Scots, and they adopt a take-no-prisoners, scorched-earth policy in dealing with the rebels.  That policy leads to scenes of at times gratuitous and gruesome violence—a Scottish lord is strung up and then has his belly slit open so that his entrails spill out in front of a horrified crowd.  His father protests, only to have his own throat cut.  Robert’s wife is suspended in a cage off of a cliff, and left exposed to the elements.  Robert’s own guerilla tactics lead to a final bloody conflict that spares neither man nor beast as the would-be King of the Scots uses the very land upon which he treads as his ally against the invaders. 

 

[Left: Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce in Outlaw King]

Bogs and ditches dotted with sharpened wooden spikes quickly make mincemeat of the English cavalry and their horses. Before the final battle, we get the obligatory rally-the-troops speech—twice.  Edward II urges the English to fight to defend their borders from invading swarms of Scots—striking a note with decidedly global echoes today.  Robert is brief: he urges his men to fight for whatever they believe in—God, Scotland, clan, family, self—just as long as they fight.  Neither rises to the rhetorical heights that Gibson’s William Wallace did in Braveheart. In battle, Robert’s right hand man is James “Black” Douglas (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who is Loudoun Hill’s version of a Viking berserker.  During the battle scenes, the scale of carnage is beyond the pale.  Robert has the opportunity to kill Edward II, but he allows him to crawl back to his troops to fight another day—though Edward II would soon enough be deposed by his own nobles.

The medieval historical epic has been a cinematic staple for more than a century.  The reasons are obvious—such films present larger than life characters whose stories are the stuff of legend.  But the golden age of the medieval historical epic has long past. In Outlaw King, except for two very brief scenes, a wedding and a funeral, in which the costume and wardrobe department seems to have decided to blow the budget, gone is the pageantry, the epic sweep, the panoramic long shot—think how Charlton Heston as the eponymous hero in Anthony Mann’s 1961 El Cid goes riding off into the sunset in the film’s final, awe-inspiring scene, and compare that scene and ride with the domesticity more than evident in Robert’s final rush on horseback to embrace his wife, who has been uncaged and returned to him as part of a prisoner exchange.  Robert is not here riding off into history and legend.  He is simply going home to his wife and daughter. Outlaw King goes for the close-up—the personal rather than the epic. Instead of pageantry, we get gore.  Instead of history, we get gritty costume piece.  The lulls in action are brief, and few, quickly giving way to more violence and gore. The camera wants us to see Robert’s scarred and bloody face, and Edward’s puking crawl through the mud as he feebly tries to reunite with troops who have abandoned him. 

[Left: In Anthony Mann’s 1961 El Cid, though dead, Charlton Heston as the title character riding off at the film’s end into history and legend.]

Heston, of course, made a career out of playing epic screen roles and larger-than-life characters; he was Moses, Ben Hur, Sir Thomas More, Cardinal Richelieu, China Gordon, Marc Antony, and Michelangelo.  A blue-faced and wide-eyed righteous avenger, Gibson’s Wallace, was, for better or worse, also larger than life.  Pine’s Robert is much less so.  His Robert is a character for the small screen—the laptop or iPhone—not for the wide screen or CinemaScope.  As the young Kirk, Jack Ryan and Wonder Woman’s Steve Trevor, Pine has certainly shown that he can act, though he clearly cannot carry a film like Outlaw King, whose predominant mood is an almost universal world weariness.  The Scots are weary of the English invading, and the English are weary of the Scots rebelling—as Dillane’s King Edward I bellows: “I am so sick of Scotland!”  Elizabeth has more spunk that her husband—and she is no one’s fool, victim, blushing bride, or obedient daughter.  She stands up to her parents, to Edward II, and even to her husband, defiant and shedding nary a tear, though she too can’t carry the film.  Film rarely finds medieval women engrossing or of more than passing interest, and, in Outlaw King, Elizabeth’s husband receives similar (mis)treatment.

Outlaw King directed by David Mackenzie, a Netflix release of a Sigma Film production, in association with Netflix and Anonymous Content.  Screenplay by David Mackenzie, James MacInnes, and Bathsheba Doran.  With Chris Pine (Robert the Bruce), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (James Douglas, Lord of Douglas), Florence Pugh (Elizabeth de Burgh), Billy Howle (Edward, Prince of Wales), Tony Curran (Angus Og Macdonald, Lord of Islay), Stephen Dillane (King Edward I), Sam Spruell (Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke), Callan Mulvey (John III Comyn, Lord of Badenoch), James Cosmo (Robert Bruce senior), Paul Blair (William Lamberton, Archbishop of St. Andrews) , Chris Fulton (Euan Bruce), Steven Cree (Sir Christopher Seton), Stephen McMillan (Squire Drew Forfar), Lorne MacFayden (Neil Bruce), Jack Greenlees (Alexander Bruce), Josie O’Brien (Marjorie Bruce), Alastair Mackenzie (John Strathbogie, Earl of Atholl), and Gilly Gilchrist (Maol Cholum I, Earl of Lennox). 146/120 minutes. From November 9, 2018, screening in cinemas and streaming on Netflix.

Mother of the Maid (Manhattan Public Theater)

What’s a Mother to Do?—

Jane Anderson’s Mother of the Maid at the Public Theater in Manhattan

Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University 
harty@lasalle.edu

Graduate students in search of a dissertation topic—or even more advanced scholars looking for a fresh scholarly pursuit—might want to consider the many stage lives of Joan of Arc, an admittedly broad collection of texts, but one so far largely understudied as an example of dramatic medievalism.  There is even a subgenre of Jehane films in which characters establish their acting credentials by playing Joan—The Miracle of the Bells, Nachalo, and The Little Drummer Girl, to name only three such films.  Joan’s legacy remains a medievalist’s dream, or nightmare, depending upon one’s perspective, as she has become a saint in a church that at one point burned her at the stake, the mother of a nation, and the darling politically both of the left and of the right— her name has been used, misused, confused, and even abused in the service of any number of, at times conflicting, causes and ideologies.  The casting of a mixed race teenager to play Joan earlier this year in festivities held in Orléans prompted such a level of abuse and outrage on social media by members of the French far right that a French state prosecutor opened an inquiry into their response on the grounds that it amounted to an incitement to racial hatred.

Joan’s stage life begins in 1435 in a mystery play of some 20,000 lines of verse with speaking parts for more than a hundred characters, Le Mystère du siege d’Orléans.  Shakespeare would take a decidedly less sympathetic view of Joan in Henry VI, Part 1 casting her as a sorceress repudiated by her own father; Voltaire would use her as the subject for an at times scurrilous mock epic; and George Bernard Shaw would turn her into a proto-Protestant.  In addition, Joan would inspire a lengthy list of playwrights, each with his or her own agenda: Friedrich Schiller, Jules Barbier, Alexandre Soumet, Charles Péguy, Percy Wallace MacKaye, Maurice Maeterlinck, Jean Anouilh, Bertolt Brecht (more than once), Maxwell Anderson, Jules Feiffer, Lanford Wilson, Richard Nelson, Carolyn Gage, Julia Pascal, Erik Ehn—and even a short-lived Broadway musical, Goodtime Charley, and a more recent rock opera, Joan of Arc, Into the Fire—though Joan has had more staying power as the subject of several more mainstream operas.  And playing Joan has proven the definitive role for many actresses as evidenced by Playing Joan, Holly Hill’s 1987 collection of interviews with those who have assayed Shaw’s Joan.

Jane Anderson’s Mother of the Maid—first produced three years ago in Lenox, Massachusetts, by Shakespeare & Company, and now on stage in a revised version at Manhattan’s Public Theater—offers yet another take on Joan, in this case through the eyes of her mother, played by the estimable stage and screen actress, Glenn Close—Jane Anderson also wrote the screenplay for The Wife, Close’s current film. 

Isabelle Romée (ca. 1377-1458) was born in Vouthon, a village not far from Domrémy.  She married Jacques Darc (1380-1440), a farmer who held a number of civic offices in the area, and gave birth to five children, two daughters and three sons, all of whom were reared in a typically pious late medieval household.  After Joan’s death at the stake in 1431, her mother moved to Orléans, whose citizens provided her with a pension in gratitude for Joan’s deliverance of the city in 1429.  In 1455, Isabelle and her two sons, Jean and Pierre, would become the plaintiffs in the case brought before the Church that resulted in the nullification of the 1431 verdict that had condemned her to death at the stake.

Anderson’s play opens after Joan (Grace Van Patten) has already had her visions of St. Catherine of Alexandria and is ready, to the consternation of both her mother and her father (Dermot Crowley), to go off to meet the Dauphin to explain her divinely inspired mission to him.  Her mother is baffled and bewildered by her daughter’s actions, while also less than secretly proud of them.  Her father is less so, but his attempts (literally) to beat some sense into his daughter are for naught.

[Left: Grace Van Patten as Joan of Arc and Glenn Close as her mother, Isabelle]

In the course of the play, Joan’s victories and defeats play out in terms of encounters with her mother, who visits her at the Dauphin’s court, at the great Cathedral of Reims on the eve of the coronation, and even in her prison in Rouen just before her execution.  How historically accurate such scenes are is beside the point, as the play attempts to fathom the reactions of a mother to her soon to be martyred daughter, a daughter more written about than perhaps any other woman in western civilization—in his novel about her, no less a light than Mark Twain would conclude that she “is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.”  In Mother, Joan is part embryonic saint, part rebellious teenager—her mother wonders if her visions are simply a sign of the onset of Joan’s puberty.  The dialogue throughout is down to earth, even at times profane.  The Darcs are a sturdy lot, tied to their land, and ferocious in their devotion to Church and state, both of which will, of course, repay that devotion with betrayal, a point not eventually lost on Joan’s mother, who has the last word in the play recounting how she managed to cope with what had happened to her daughter. 

  

The Church here is represented by the well-meaning parish priest, Father Gilbert (Daniel Pearce), and the secular powers by an unnamed Lady of the Court (Kate Jennings Grant), equally well-meaning but, more often than not, clueless and scatter-brained in stark contrast to the decidedly less-pampered and formidable Darc women.  Just as Joan inspired a nation on a grand scale, she also inspired her mother who learned to read and write, who would go to Rome to confront the pope, and who, during the nullification trial, took on those who had had the temerity to condemn and execute her daughter. Since, thanks to the exhaustive transcripts from her two trials, we already know so very much about the details of Joan’s all-to-brief life, it might have been more interesting to have had a play about her mother’s life after Joan’s death as a testimonial to the remarkably fierce woman who was mother to an even more remarkably fierce daughter. But the play as we now have it is, nonetheless, a wonderful piece of theatre, and a fine vehicle for Close and her fellow cast members.  John Lee Beatty’s simple, functional set easily transforms from farm house, to castle chamber, to prison cell.  Jane Greenwood’s costumes are period appropriate, Alexander Sovronsky’s score adds some fine musical touches to the dialogue, and Matthew Penn’s direction knows when to allow his actors to trust their own instincts.daughter.

  
Mother of the Maid, written by Jane Anderson, directed by Matthew Penn, scenic design by John Lee Beatty, costume design by Jane Greenwood, lighting design by Lap Chi Chu, original music by Alexander Sovronsky; with Glenn Close, Dermot Crowley, Olivia Gilliatt, Kate Jennings Grant, Andrew Hovelson, Daniel Pearce, and Grace Van Patten; at Manhattan’s Public Theater—Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director—from September 25, 2018.