Brighton Year-Round 2025

Charlie Josephine: I, Joan

Brighton Little Theatre

Genre: Biographical Drama, Costume, Drama, Feminist Theatre, Fringe Theatre, Historical, LGBTQ+ Theatre, LGBTQIA+, Outdoor and Promenade, Political, Theatre

Venue: BOAT (Brighton Open Air Theatre)

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

They’ve always been there, most of us knew it. But it’s taken Charlie Josephine’s I, Joan to reimagine Joan’s opening address: “Truth is, queerness is magic, pure magic! We are beautiful, and powerful, and for that we are killed.” Present tense of course. With its Globe premiere in September 2022, Isobel Thom made their professional debut: probably the greatest in living memory, certainly the greatest I’ve seen. No pressure for Daisy Miles, full-time Joan of Arc impersonator, making her BLT debut in a blazingly committed team helmed by director Mimi Goddard (with onstage Bradley Coffey as assistant director). Miles storms it in an outstanding performance.

There’s more of that in this two-hours-30 traversal of a voice we always suspected, which even with a near 30-mimute interval, shaves 20 minutes off the Globe’s production, and three cast-members. This pacey, sprung production is always moving: it happens fast, furious with all the Fs between (a lot of Fs).

Miles grabs Josephine’s (and Thom’s) creation with their own throat, Puck in a shimmering breastplate spinning like some centripetal force through and above the BOAT audience on occasion; and mostly onstage in the grassy lozenge stage. Blocking and movement is excellent, so Coffey’s and Godard’s costumes throw bright-coloured actors around a curvy rampart that bends danger with precision. Even to Patti Griffiths’ wig. It’s vertiginous, exhilarating. Great shields and gear too, though surely the wooden swords might have made a braver show. Steven Adams as ever supplies some scene-painting.

The sheer energy of it is amplified in Millie Edinburgh’s sound and Beverley Grover’s (latterly) lighting. A riffing of 80s beat music ends wittily with Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Go Your Own Way’.

We open with more BLT debuts. Lionel De Swarte-Danko’s striding Charles the Dauphin “bored” which despite his terrific energy (he doesn’t yet know how strong his voice is, even in open air) is a scene a bit long before the real power emerges: storytelling Shaw managed more wittily, that Josephine relays here like a duty.

It’s the transgressive points, men’s apparel, which truly did scandalise the court, where Josephine fuses dress and that identity word only Joan’s bestie peasant-born Thomas resolves as “they”. True, sick-hearted Laurits Hiroshi Bjerram is in his element here, making like Miles one of the strongest showings. He owns poise and stillness, as well as knowing exactly how to place himself. His exchanges with Miles are exquisitely painful and occasionally joyous.

We move through a gloriously energised suite of battles, but Godard and Coffey craft a ballet of bloodshed where 10 of the 11 cast dance, die and resurrect with haunting fluidity. There’s more BLT debuts. When Rhys Bloy’s rough-hewn general Dunois gets underway, always calling Joan “Kid”, the production ups a gear with their initially testy then warm interchange fuelling battles before warfare. Bloy’s is the third superb performance here.

There’s fine work too from Honor Calder-Cameron’s cat-like Queen Marie, slavishly echoing Claire Wiggins’s wily, super-enunciated Dowager mother Yolande, repository of many wrongs to women: a court-intrigue double-act cutting across even Charles.

Josephine shows their stratagems as realpolitik: offstage securing a peace neither Charles or especially Joan dreams of. Jasmine Chance Ramsey in smaller roles voices a distinction and presence you’d rather hear more of, and Rosalind Caldwell (straight from BLT’s Jekyll and Hyde) disposes misogynistic vocal authority with creepy treachery, just as she promised.

The troupe of Joan’s Army – Alexa Rusakoff, Finlay Brookes and Coffey – form a tight-knit chorus of ballet, identity, and wonder around Miles, where Josephine allows Joan’s difference to register both celebration and self-questioning.

Indeed Coffey’s roles culminate in Bishop Beaupere’s iron-voiced damnations – counterpointed in a dissonant huddle. Bloy again comes to the fore in the final tableau where most shift identities to inquisitors, in his serpent-voiced chief inquisitor Cauchon.

To hear Miles with no vocal tiredness after two-and-a-half hours orate so unstoppably is something: “Your binary. Your boxes. Your pathetic attempts to create certainty in the chase of illusionary safety. Nothing’s certain! Babes, it’s allllllll fluid! Sweet n sticky, spillin’ out your boxes, drippin’ all down the sides of your binary.” Drones and toilets are mixed in. The revolution called for is to sweep the English into the sea. Which English, which century? We’re with Joan by this time, a grassy O of revolution.

So I missed the fatuous twitter-storm that accompanied the original Globe publicity. Josephine’s traversal yes, not travesty. Naturally it’s not simply about 15^th century Joan but those very stormers spelling precarity for Joan’s spiritual descendants, which includes most of us, binary or not. And in three years it’s got so much worse. Funny how no-one’s offended by Shakespeare’s sexually voracious sado-path, but then he’s safely dead culture, not a living one to be killed. If only they knew. And one suspects Shakespeare, indeed Shaw – creating Joans for their politics –  would enjoy Josephine, Thom and now Miles.

Though this role was made for Thom, few one feels could carry the torch with such blazing power as Miles. Over nearly 150 minutes she’s barely offstage. The effect’s almost stupefying. There are longeurs shaved from the original, and we take in because it’s Miles and because Josephine writes some unforgettable prose-poetry. “Our tongues on fire lappin’ up sparks! Her smiles wide got me high like bright skies! Off our nuts on assonance! A verb, raving, in the middle of a noun!” It recalls Joelle Taylor’s award-winning C+nto, a passage of which was quoted in the original programme.

Josephine hints at a moment of hubris sowing seeds, a neat plot-point they don’t exploit. The overly famous givens in Joan’s life means even Josephine can’t omit essentials like the Dauphin pretending to be someone else, or Joan’s recantation – more neatly handled. But Josephine could compress these more and again BLT’s team do. We needed five minutes of fourth-wall too, not ten, and here we get it. Josephine dilates a message we need to hear three times, but it can dilute. Heretical – because the sheer words are often exhilarating. I wrote in my original review:  “we could have done with more trimming, 20 minutes at least, and a greater thew of plot.” Thanks BLT.

To have pulled this show together at short notice with this degree of energy is exceptional. There’s a few unadjusted vocals and positioning but it’s the first night, Josephine’s text throws first-play challenges and the achievement here is astonishing.

This is to judge at the highest level Josephine’s play demands. BLT’s cast and creatives deserve the highest praise for believing in and lifting a behemoth of lyrical ecstasy, trimming occasionally diffuse minutes. Don’t wait, though. It’s the first blaze of summer, and we need Josephine’s fire and Joan’s voices for the furies ahead.

Miles, supremely, Bjerrum and Bloy excel in a fine cast and prove this clarion of a play can rise again triumphantly even without Thom, at Brighton’s answer to the Globe. Groundbreaking.

Stage Manager Vicky Horder

Set Design Painting Steven Adams,

Wig Patti Griffiths, Photography Miles Davies

Published June 5, 2025June 5, 2025 by Simon Jenner