Saint Joan

Saint Joan (1923). Winifred Lenihan was the first American Joan in the Theatre Guild's 1923 production of Shaw's play. Although some critics felt her performance was too undisciplined and frenetic to be totally satisfying, Lawrence Langner, looking back over several decades, insisted her “courage, fervor and youth” made her the best Joan he had ever seen. Katharine Cornell headed the cast of a 1936 revival with supporting players Brian Aherne, Tyrone Power, Arthur Byron, Charles Waldron, and Kent Smith. John Anderson of the Journal observed, “Her performance is enkindled by the spiritual exaltation of a transcendent heroine.” In 1951 Uta Hagen starred as the maid, giving a determined, totally believable performance that paid only small attention to the mystic aspects behind the story. Less successful was a 1956 Phoenix Theatre revival in which Siobhan McKenna made Joan into a fanatic, not very intelligent Irish serving girl, but years later Diana Sands in 1968, Lynn Redgrave in 1978, and Maryann Plunkett in 1993 shone in the role.

Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes, and an Epilogue (1923), by George Bernard Shaw. Written shortly after the canonization of the 15th-cent. French girl, it counters the 19th-cent. sentimentalization of her story. Shaw's Joan is forthright, energetic, and strong of will.

George Bernard Shaw 1923

George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan was first produced in New York City in 1923 and in London in 1924. Shaw published it with a long Preface in 1924. When word came out that Shaw, who was known as an irreverent jokester, was writing about a Christian saint and martyr, there were fears that he would not be able to produce something appropriate, but the early reception of the play was generally favorable, although some commentators criticized him for historical inaccuracy and for being too talky or comic. Over the years, the play, a rare tragic work in his generally comic oeuvre, has been seen as one of his greatest and most important. It has been hailed as being intellectually exciting and praised for dealing with important themes, such as nationalism, war, and the relation of the individual to society. The play solidified Shaw’s reputation as a major playwright and helped win him the Nobel Prize in 1925.

Being at least in part a tragedy, though with comic moments, Saint Joan is part of a shift in Shaw’s work from his earlier optimistic comedies to a more melancholy attitude, perhaps in part the result of his reaction to World War I.

Although he had been thinking about Joan of Arc as early as 1913, Shaw did not actually begin writing the play until 1923, three years after Joan’s canonization. He consulted many earlier works on Joan, including the transcripts of her trial. In fact, he modestly said that he had done little more than reproduce Joan’s own words as recorded in the transcripts; however, that statement is unfair to Shaw, who left a distinctive Shavian touch on the story of the martyred saint.