Shaw's Saint

Last week gabby old George Bernard Shaw tripped through the U. S. Southwest leaving columns of commonplace impertinences in his wake. Simultaneously a 13-year-old Shavian masterwork made thrilling news for Manhattan playgoers when Katharine Cornell revived Saint Joan.

Critical consensus was that the Irish dramatist, well past his productive prime, had never been seen to better advantage.

For many a critic, Saint Joan is the lone instance in which the world's cleverest playwright discards the brakes of self-consciousness and permits himself one glorious swoop of spiritual freewheeling. In common with the body of Shaviana, Saint Joan turns on an agile inversion. But this inversion, the definition of a miracle as an event which creates faith, seems to spring from Shaw's heart instead of his head. A great, noble warmth suffuses the narrative from the time the tomboy Maid (Miss Cornell) makes de Baudricourt's hens lay in order to persuade him to horse and arm her, to the time she. reappears in the modern epilog as a mailed member of the hierarchy of heaven.

Actress Cornell has surrounded herself with a high-powered troupe of actors, among them Brian Aherne, Charles Waldron, Arthur Byron. Another excellent performance is turned in by Kent Smith as Dunois, the''Bastard of Orleans. He it is who witnesses Joan's first military miracle on the banks of the Loire, when the wind shifts so that the French may attack the English by surprise, thus starting the invaders out of the Kingdom and Joan on her way to the fires of martyrdom. As for peerless Actress Cornell, spectators found her full of the youthful fire that danced around her Juliet, approved the added touch of honest rusticity which brought the full flush of credibility to her Joan.

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