George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan Fights for God and France

Joan of Arc is one of the great heroines in world history. Everybody knows her story. She was an illiterate 17-year-old French peasant girl who had visions of saints telling her that God wanted her to convince the Dauphin of France to let her lead her country’s army in 1429 in an effort to defeat the English and win the Hundred Years War. Joan led the French to a huge triumph at Orleans and set them on the way to victory in the conflict. Shortly afterwards, she was captured and burned at the stake. France and the world hailed her for five hundred years. In 1920, the Roman Catholic Church, that helped to execute her, made her a saint.

Joan’s story has been told often in books, movies and plays over the years. One of the best works was George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan, that is getting a majestic revival on Broadway this spring. The triumphant tale of the maid of Orleans opened last night at the Samuel Friedman Theater, on W. 47thStreet and brings the bold French warrior back to life in a stirring drama.

The plays stars the mercurial Condola Rashad as Joan. She is terrific. Rashad is at times powerful, at other times sad and sometimes very, very funny in her sharp barbs against Kings, Cardinals and Generals. She turns Joan into a charismatic, if doomed, national hero. She makes the play the big hit that it is.

The tale starts right away when Joan arrives at offices of busy, argumentative Frenchman Robert de Baudricourt, her arms waving and voice raised, and pleads with him to give her a horse, suit of armor and a group of soldiers so she can take over the leadership of the French army at Orleans after she sees the Dauphin of France and gets approval from him. De Baudricourt is aghast at her demands, and stunned that she claims numerous visions of saints, all sent to her from God, who has apparently decided to make the untrained farm girl a General.

De Baudricourt calls in a soldier and tells him Joan is mad. No, the soldier says with convincing awe, “there is something different about her.”

De Baudricourt, whose armies continually lose to the English and will try anything, even a 17-year-old girl, sends the maid to the Dauphin who, frustrated with his military failures, too, though scoffing at her “voices,” orders her to Orleans, where she scores a great victory.

She returns, flags flying, cheered by her troops and the citizens of France, but the religious and political leaders do not embrace her. Not at all. They want to get rid of her because they are jealous. They tell her she needs to go home because the British will execute her if she is captured and that there is nothing they can do to stop them.

● One after another, they tell Joan that she is alone and helpless because she has no political skills, and no friends at the top. The head general tells her, right to her face, that the army officers all hate her because she did something that they have done in decades - win. The Cardinal hates her because she scoffs at him, and all church officials, and says she answers only to God. They do not believe that she hears instructions from heaven, either. The Dauphin sees her as a real pain in the ass (“Joan, be quiet and go home,” he tells her). and loathes her for being the hero he always wanted to be in the eyes of the crowds. The people, the Dauphin senses, have no love for him, their rightful leader, but adore this farm girl from the sticks. All of the leaders yell at her that she pays no attention to anybody, dismisses authority, disobeys orders and always thinks she is right – and keeps telling people that.

● The people? The people of France idolize her but, as the country’s officials tell Joan, the people have no power.

● The leaders, from Generals to Cardinals, believe they have convinced her to go back to her farm. Her answer? She waves her arm at them and shouts “Let’s take Paris!” and off she goes.

● She takes charge of the army and fights in a long campaign and is, in fact, captured at Compiegne by the Burgundians, a French military faction led by The Duke of Burgundy, and turned over to the English. She is held for trial as a war criminal. They charge her with everything they can think of, including, funny as it may be today, “dressing as a man.” 

● The British, led by the headstrong Earl of Warwick, a great politician, want her dead right away but know that they can’t execute her because they need the go ahead from the Catholic Church in France and scheme with church leaders to win it.

● Joan is doomed. The French, with British help, lacking any real charges, put her on trial for heresy and that is the searing finale of the play. 

● Director Daniel Sullivan has done a superb job of coordinating different aspects of the play and, carefully, carries the story from scene to scene and addresses her trial with great bravura and, at he same time, takes great pains to show how the church turned on her and how both the French and British framed her.

● Joan of Arc never had a chance.

● Shaw himself, the playwright, did a fine job of bring the mostly true history of Joan, chronicled in numerous books, and was careful about his research. The play follows French history pretty closely. The Hundred Years War started in 1337 and turned into a bloody conflict that tore apart France and England. Dukes murdered each other and schemed for decades. When Joan of Arc saw her visions, the head of the battered country was the Dauphin, Charles VII, heir to the throne. In 1429 the British were on the verge of a mammoth victory in their apparent triumph at Orleans, on the Loire River. If it fell, the path seemed clear to a complete British victory and the end of the French royalty. 

● Following Joan’s victory at Orleans, she led her inspired forces to a string of victories that started to push the British out of France and resulted in the Dauphin’s official coronation as King of France and incredible celebrity for Joan, seen by the people as the lone woman who would save the nation. Joan, of course, would never live to see that.

The execution of Joan at the age of 19 rallied the French, who went on to get their entire country back. In 1456 the Pope threw out the French and British heresy charges against her and declared her a Martyr. In the 16thcentury she became the heroine of the powerful Catholic League and gained everlasting glory when in 1803 was she hailed by Napoleon as a national hero.

In addition to the brilliant Rashad as Joan, director Sullivan gets sterling performances from Walter Bobbie as the Bishop, Adam Chanler-Berat as the Dauphin, Jack Davenport as the Earl of Warwick Patrick Page as the Inquisitor, Max Gordon Moore as Brother Martin and a skilled ensemble cast.

The Manhattan Theater Club does a wonderful job of telling the true history of the saga in the play. In each program there is also a map of western Europe that shows the different occupied areas of France (British in the North and France in the South, Burgundians in the Northeast), and the timeline of Joan’s arrival, command of the army and trial. The producers of the play have also put up a large map of the war’s action in the lounge in the ground floor lounge of the theater. These set up the history of the story for theatergoers in a charming way.

Saint Joan is a beloved historic figure and Rashad, as the maid of Orleans, is nothing short of sensational in this remarkably well-told story of France’s historic treasure.

PRODUCTION: The play is produced by the Manhattan Theater Club. Sets: Scott Pask, Costumes: Jane Greenwood, Lighting: Justin Townsend, Sound: Obadiah Eaves, Production Design: Christopher Ash. The play is directed by Daniel Sullivan. It has an open-ended run.