Shaw's Joan, My Joan and Ours

 Since the rough beast’s hour has come round at last, I am  finding consolation and distraction in old enthusiasms. When I found that Holly Hill’s Playing Joan survived the Great Purge, I reread it, which led inevitably to G. B. Shaw’s play and, of course, its preface.
 One thing I concluded this time around is that the old self-proclaimed atheist was more than a little smitten with the Fifteenth Century saint. Shaw’s characters generally are projections of Shaw, but in writing the Maid’s role he yielded to his subject. He let her speak for herself; some of her best lines, worthy of Shaw, are straight out of the transcript of Joan’s heresy trial in 1431.


 Through the mouths of other characters Shaw makes Joan out to be the first Protestant and the first Nationalist. She was no Protestant. Like most atheists, Shaw didn’t know the Catholic Church teaches that  “(a) human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience. If he were to deliberately act against it he would condemn himself.” (CCC 11790) Joan makes exactly that argument at her trial.
  Her nationalism seems to me to be less deniable and more problematic, since its history is serial adoption by tyrants, con men and poltroons.
  Shaw is better on her voices — of St. Margaret (of Antioch) and St. Catherine (of Alexandria) and sometimes of Michael the Archangel — than most of the Joan biographers I’ve read. I almost had to admire Vita Sackville-West who, in the course of a very friendly biography, said, in effect, “I can’t make anything out of Joan’s voices,” and proceeded to write the next few hundred pages without them. That’s a little like Moby Dick without a boat. Shaw, on the other hand, said she heard voices, and so do many people in all ages. So get over it. The main test is, does the voice give sound advice? Joan’s told a 17- or maybe 19-year-old girl to lift the siege of Orleans and crown the dauphin, and she did. Q.E.D.

  Capt. ROBERT DE BAUDRICOURT:  It is the will of God that I shall send you back to your father with orders to put you under lock and key and thrash the madness out of you. What do you say to that?
 JOAN: You think you will, squire; but you will find it all coming quite different. You said you would not see me, but here I am.

  Vanessa Redgrave told Holly Hill that when she began playing Joan, she made up her own faces for the voices, but by the end of the run gargoyle-type faces had replaced them when she looked upward for them in the cathedral scene and, later, at the trial. Other actresses Hill interviewed said they had no trouble with that aspect of Joan; lots of people hear voices.
 “I came to accept the voices as fact, unquestionably, as Joan did,” said Marjorie Brewer. “Don’t misunderstand me — this was not a profound religious experience; it just was.”
 I should explain that Playing Joan consists of Hill’s (mostly) interviews with as many living actresses as she could reach who had played prominent Joans up too the mid-1980s.  Her inspiration was the realization that no one knows how the original Hamlets played the role, but there was time to get the early Joans on record. The first, Sybil Thorndyke (1924) had died, but Hill got 16 of them, including Thorndyke’s daughter, Ann Casson, and such as Jane Alexander, Judi Dench, Uta Hagen, Joan Plowright and Redgrave.
 The Joan on the cover is Siobahn McKenna, whom we had the opportunity to see in the role on our honeymoon. (Peter Falk — Colombo — made his stage debut as the English soldier.) That production had a very potent influence on my personal Catholicism for the next decade or so.
 (Siobahn had translated Shaw into Gaelic before she did the play in English. One of her former seminary students told me she taught elocution at Maynooth Seminary back in the day. When she died, he sent me clips of the funeral coverage from the Irish press; not a pub was missed from the altar to the grave.)
 The actress’ first problem is that Joan was a teenager, but  actresses of that age don’t have the technique to sustain a role that is both physically and mentally gymnastic. As Dame Judi said, “(w)hen you are Joan’s age you’re not old enough to play her, and when you are old enough to play Juliet, you are too old.”
 Siobhan noted that of all the plays about Joan of Arc, only two used “Saint Joan” in the title, and both were by atheists — Shaw and Bertolt Brecht.
  Burned by the English as a convicted heretic of the Church, Joan of Arc wound a saint of the same Church and a dream girl of atheists. Her role in theater, alone, is difficult and rewarding enough to keep her legend alive.
 The important people of this world last longer than the election cycle.