Rebel in Arms

By T.E. Kalem

SAINT JOAN

by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw is the autocrat of the blackboard. His writing hand flies furiously across the surfaces of his plays, chalking up social, moral and intellectual lessons for the playgoer-students. The class almost always relishes the talking jags of the sage of Ayot St. Lawrence, for he never created a major character who was not indubitably and ebulliently G.B.S.

Joan the Maid is Shaw in yet another transparent disguise. It is not difficult to imagine him in medieval armor wielding a righteous sword against the dragons of this world. Scene by scene, Saint Joan is rather like an extended series of lectures, a kind of droning college seminar labeled "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Nationalism, 1412-1431."

Ironically, the character of Joan as saint captivated Shaw less than it has the public. He was more interested in Joan the soldier as an embodiment of France, and most interested of all in Joan the revolutionary sounding the first, heady, rebel call to arms of insurrectionary mass man. Using his own hyphenated emphases, Shaw describes her as a "protestant" and a "nation-alist." Joan protests against the authority of the church in favor of the individual conscience. She subverts the authority of the feudal aristocracy by proclaiming the supremacy of the nation-state. It is the love of democracy, not the love of God, which binds Joan's commoner-soldiers to the peasant-saint. It is the fear of democracy, not the fear of God, which Joan puts into the hearts of the lords temporal and spiritual.

How could a simple country girl do all this and inspire clods, skeptics and a King-to-be with a blind, unswerving faith? Shaw is of no particular help. He has various characters say at various times: "There's something about the girl." All the rest is left to the actress who plays Joan. She must give the play a luminous soul. In the disastrous revival at Manhattan's Circle in the Square Theater, Lynn Redgrave proves woefully incapable of that. She has the inspiring warmth of an undraped mannequin in a store window. Her metallic high-pitched voice seems to issue from some implanted accordion, and her stance and gestures suggest those of a badly coordinated puppet. She seems to want to hear her heavenly "voices," but perhaps the decibel count onstage is too high for that.

Not that anyone else under John Clark's flaccid direction is giving her much acting competition. Robert LuPone's Dauphin is such a prancing cipher that one fears the crown that Joan se cures for him at Rheims Cathedral will melt his head. Paul Sparer, as the Inquisitor, gives a saturnine gravity to the renowned and convoluted speech on heresy, but his plea for justice with mercy is a trifle smarmy. Only Philip Bosco as the English Earl of Warwick conveys nobility in voice and bearing.

Shaw finally asks when mankind will be capable of accepting its saints. Here, his logic falters. Saints exist not to redeem men but to shame them.

-- T.E. Kalem

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