Saint Joan

The Strand London 21st July 1994

Written by George Bernard Shaw
Director Gale Edwards

Synopsis:

Programme CoverShaw play deals with the intellectual arguments surrounding Joan's life and death. Written in 1924 it is considered by many to be his masterpiece.

Saint Joan is set at a time of great upheaval in France with two competing claims to the French throne. In 1420, nearly eighty years into the Hundred Years War, the French prince, or Dauphin, was disinherited in favour of the infant Henry VI of England, according to the Treaty of Troyes.

Shaw's play begins in 1429 at the fortress of Vaucouleurs, where the commander Robert de Baudricourt Joan who declares that she is on a mission from God to defeat the English and crown the Dauphin as King of France. Despite Baudricourt's skepticism, Joan persuades him to sponsor her journey in soldier's armour to the Dauphin's court at Chinon.

At Chinon, the courtiers doubt Joan's authenticity. To test her, the Dauphin changes places with a courtier, but Joan easily recognises his royal blood. Encouraged, the Dauphin grants Joan command of his army.

Joan arrives at the outskirts of the besieged city of Orleans. There the French captain Dunois is waiting for a west wind in order to cross the Loire River. The wind arrives with Joan, who leads the charge. Orleans is freed within nine days, and the English are pushed back. This marks a major turn in the French fortunes against the Anglo-Burgundian forces, and constitutes Joan's most influential miracle.

Six weeks later, the Earl of Warwick meets with the Bishop of Beauvais, Peter Cauchon, to plan Joan's capture. The Bishop sees a threat to the established Church in Joan's individualistic religious claims, whereas Warwick fears the erosion of feudal power in her nationalistic politics. The chauvinistic English chaplain, John de Stogumber, declares that Joan must be a witch, since the English could not have been beaten otherwise.

At the cathedral of Rheims, Charles VII is crowned King of France according to the ancient rites. Joan wants to continue her military campaign to regain Paris, but the authorities of court, church, and army warn her that she may lose their support if she presumes too far.

Shaw omits the next year and a half of Joan's life. During this time she led an unsuccessful attack on Paris, violating a truce that Charles had signed with the Burgundians. The next spring, Joan was captured by Burgundian forces in the battle of Compiegne. The English purchased this important captive and turned her over to Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, for trial in Rouen, despite the fact that Cauchon had no legal jurisdiction in that district.

Shaw resumes the play a year after Joan's capture. The Deputy Inquisitor and many other assessors join Cauchon for the proceedings. Under threat of burning and the urgent appeals from Brother Martin Ladvenu, Joan denies her voices and recants. But when the sentence of life imprisonment is pronounced on her, she withdraws her recantation and is burnt at the stake for heresy by Warwick's soldiers.

As Shaw says, Joan's history really begins, not ends, with her execution, for the world has wrestled with the meaning of her life and death for five hundred years. Shaw's time-travelling epilogue takes place in 1456, just after new hearings overturned the 1431 verdict against Joan, thus ensuring the validity of Charles VII's consecration. Charles' thoughts turn once again to the Maid, and Shaw asks his audience whether we could tolerate a saint any better than our fifteenth-century counterparts. As Saint Joan says, "Are none of you ready to receive me?"

Just a bit of Trivia Dunois by his own insistance, went proudly by the title "The Bastard of Orléans"

Dunois and Joan

Cast:

Saint Joan

The Strand London
Review by David Murrey Financial Times 23/07/94

With Saint Joan George Bernard Shaw wrote a play that requires a charismatic heroine, but plugs her in only certain points.

It is not, strictly speaking, a star vehicle, and if played like one it usually flounders; Shaw had other fish to fry.

At the Strand Theatre, the director Gale Edwards (Australian, female) has got the balance exactly right. It stirs mind and heart alike, and if you have intelligent teenage children you should take them along to be stirred aswell. Few modern "classics" command our thoughtful sympathies like Saint Joan, and still fewer productions do them such faithful justice.

Philip as Dunois

The play is not really about "Jeanne la Pucelle", but about the almost accidental role she played in larger, much tougher world of politics and religlon, of which she understood nothing.

In fact Saint Joan represents a disillusioned retrospective, 1920s view of history as Realpolitik. The heroine is there to fascinate us, but the us, but the heart of the drama and it is drama, not just Shavian sparring - lies in the different ways she is perceived and used by the politicel masters, both the French (Burgundian) and the English.

All Joan has to do is to be, while the real action stretches out around and beyond her. In the small person of Imogen Stubbs, she is a marvel of bright-eyed energy, from her first bounding entrance. Distinctly elfin, in fact, with balletic touches, and much more gamine than gamin; one remembered Joan Plowright’s homely, no-nonsense activist (a long way back!) with some nostalgia.

But Miss Stubba wields a big, tremulous voice with the best of them, and regularly catches us between the ribs.

Perhaps she could measure a greater distance between eager optismism at the start, and weary desolation at the end.

Those Audrey Hepburn eyes do not change much, and there was an awkward moment when she collapsed to the floor in despair, too obviously confident of succour by strong arms - which she duly got. As a butterfly broken on a wheel, nevertheless, she is a radiant creature.

The production has stark sets by Peter J. Davison, basically vertical slabs that just once open out to give us a fine side-chapel view of the Dauphin’s coronation in Reims Cathedral. (Reims, by the way, is sometimes Reims and sometimes “Reems”, even in the mouths of different French personnel) That is all to the good: picturesque ramparts are not what the play needs. What it chiefly needs is a solid team of politicos, both temporal and spiritual; and these Miss Edwards has supplied in full measure.

Faced with pages of Shavian debate, many a director equips his or her actors with a rich variety of tics to sugar the pill. Not Miss Edwards; instead, she makes the debates supply the characters - the variously foxy or temporisrng Frenchmen, the blunt or choleric English.

We listen hard. I particularly admired Bruce Purchase’s virtuosity with the Archbishop’s speeches, which he rattles off quite lucidly at high speed, thus saving vital minutes. There is a good Dunois from Philip Quast, and a properly sullen Cauchon from Paul Webster.

Highest praise, though, for Peter Jeffrey’s inquisitor and Ken Bones’ Earl of Warwick, both of them revelling in pawky subtleties. Jeffrey is a gentle model of temperate, deadly reasonableness; Bones - with a startling likeness to Norman Tebbit - plays Warwick with an air of cheerful ruthlessness, letting his weary, cynical intelligence peep through as the situation develops. There is just a trace of pain, and distaste, when the execution has to be got through.

Jasper Britton’s artful Dauphin supplies more than comic relief. There is a twitch or two too many, but his petulance is genuine and sour.

As young Brother Martin appaulling at seeing the trap closed, Nicholas Rowe conveys strenght as well as a tender heart. In the epilgue, Gordan Langford Rowe is spendidly unbi as the plain English Soldier. Among others too numerous to mention, there is no weak link.

As Warwick's testy chaplain de Stogumber, David Daker for me makes the voice of Bernard Shaw heard. A plain, thick Englishman he fulminates and blusters vengefully but when the chips go down he is overcome with simple horror.

In his empirical English way, he needs to see what burning at the stake means: having it his revulsion is absolute.

A real vegetarian's argument, that amid all the thrust and counter thrust which Shaw mimics with such rekish, this is where the stopper comes, the final NO. Shaw was not a cynic.



[UPDATES] [BIOGRAPHY] [ARTICLES & INTERVIEWS ] [ STAGE ]

[ FILM & TV ][AUDIO/VIDEO ] [ LINKS] [SCRAPBOOK] [ HOME ]


© Kate McCullugh & Angela Pollard 2001. No portion of this page may be copied without permission of the author.