When, in 1920, Joan of Arc was canonised by the Church, whose Inquisition had burned her at the stake five centuries earlier, George Bernard Shaw turned in earnest to a subject with which he had toyed for 10 years. The publication in English of the transcripts of her trial and the emotionally charged context of the post-first World War period lent weight and urgency to his dramatisation of the celebrated story of La Pucelle (the virgin). Saint Joan, first performed in 1923 with Sybil Thorndike in the leading role, was Shaw's most successful play and secured his nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature - to his professed dismay. "I am in the very odour of sanctity after St Joan," he wrote to a friend. Often compared with Hamlet, Shaw's Joan is one of the most challenging roles for women in the theatre, against which many leading actresses have measured themselves, including Uta Hagen, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, Sian Phillips and Janet Suzman. Siobhan McKenna translated it into Irish for An Taibhdearc in Galway in 1952, and also played in Hilton Edwards's production at The Gate, which toured extensively in Europe.
Of all the dramatic, literary and cinematic renderings of the figure of Joan of Arc, from Shakespeare's in Henry VI Part One, to those of Schiller, Verdi, Anouilh and Brecht, it is Shaw's spirited, obstinate, blunt and brave young woman who speaks most directly to a 20th-century audience. Stripped of the aura of romanticism that has always clung to her, his Joan is a rational Shavian heroine, defending in ringing tones her freedom of conscience, her female equality, her right to speak and to be heard.
While many of the lines Joan speaks in the play are direct quotes from the trial transcript from 1431, the frequently playful, almost flippant tone of the early scenes is indisputably Shaw's. The shift in emphasis, from the exhibitionist pantomime prince of the early scenes, gleefully grabbing the limelight in her suit of armour, to the fervent idealist, delivering impassioned speeches at her trial, is difficult to negotiate and to make convincing. Sarah Miles pronounced the role "unplayable" and many other actors have complained that Shaw's conception of it is too rigid and too sceptical.
The story of the 17-year-old, illiterate peasant from Domremy, who shattered conventions of gender and status and died a martyr's death, exerts an abiding fascination. Embodying pubescent girls' dreams of valour, power, glamour and sublime self-sacrifice, Joan is associated with myths of ancient goddesses and Amazons; she belongs to a line of historical heroines whose achievements are all the more compelling because of their rarity. Over the centuries she has been cast, in turn, as an icon of Christian virtue whose chastity symbolises her saintliness; a tragic romantic heroine who falls in love and loses her taste for battle; a socialist martyr; a mascot of French nationalism and a feminist role model - as Marina Warner in her authoritative study, Joan Of Arc (1981) has documented.
Unlike other great women warriors such as Boadicea or Maeve, Joan was not a queen and unlike the many female mystics of the late medieval period, including Julian of Norwich, Bridget of Sweden, Margery Kempe and Hildegard of Bingen, she was active rather than contemplative in the expression of her faith.
She came to prominence in a period of great turbulence, of social upheaval, religious credulity and fear. In the years that followed the English victory over France at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, when English forces held northern France and Henry VI had been appointed as future king of both England and France, "Jehanne La Pucelle", as she called herself, was entrusted with a divine mission. She aimed to liberate Orleans - the strategic centre of France, besieged by the English in 1429; to have the Dauphin Charles of France crowned as Charles VII and ultimately to drive the English out of France. Hers was a very specific and pugnacious mission; she saw herself as a servant of Christ engaged in a holy war. Dressed as a knight in fine silks and brocades, she embraced the chivalric code. Joan's unshakeable belief in the saints' voices that prompted her, revived the failing courage of the Dauphin and galvanised the many factions on the French side. To people susceptible to numinous manifestations, the dramatic nature of her intervention and the utter anomalousness of her youth, origins and above all, sex, made it all the more likely that she had indeed been sent by God; otherwise she was inexplicable.
With this signal of divine favour, the French forces regained the upper hand and Charles was triumphantly crowned at the cathedral in Rheims. For one brief summer, La Pucelle was the saviour of France and all kinds of miracles, prophecies and portents were associated with her name. Stories circulated about her childhood years and great powers of healing and divination were attributed to her. Then came the reversal: after her failed attempt to liberate Paris, she was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English (with whom they were allied), imprisoned, turned over to the Inquisition, tried at Rouen and burned as a heretic in May 1431. The principal charges against her were of not submitting to the rule of the church, of not renouncing her visions, of wearing a "dissolute, ill-shaped and immodest dress against the decency of nature" and of being seditious and idolatrous.
While not actually accused of witchcraft, she was charged with communicating with evil spirits, which made her deeply suspect. Fear of witchcraft was rampant, fuelled by the Inquisition, and in English versions of her story, such as the sources that Shakespeare drew on for Henry VI Part One, she was described as a witch and a harlot, a foul-mouthed spitfire who first feigned pregnancy to avoid punishment and finally died vehemently cursing her enemies.
As is documented in the trial record, Joan signed a confession but, realising that she would be condemned to life-long imprisonment rather than be released, she retracted it and reaffirmed her belief in her divine mission and in the voices of St Michael, St Catherine and St Bridget, which inspired her. Shortly after her death, the campaign to clear her name began, culminating in her canonisation in 1920. In popular myth she became a Christ-figure, sacrificed so that France could be saved, and Shaw echoes this association: "Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?" the bishop, Cauchon, asks rhetorically.
It is impossible to read Saint Joan now without thinking of Stalinist show trials and of the McCarthy period in the US. To an extent, it may be compared to Miller's The Crucible, though Shaw's emphasis is less on group psychology and the manipulation of hysteria than on the competing claims of church and state and the powerlessness of the individual who does not bend her will to either. "The Inquisition is not dead," Shaw wrote in 1931. "When in modern times you fall behind-hand with your political institutions . . . you get dictatorships and when you get dictatorships you may take it from me that you will, with the greatest certainty, get a secret tribunal dealing with sedition, with political heresy - exactly like the Inquisition."
Shaw's Joan is a proto-Protestant, as is stated explicitly on several occasions in the play. She is an advocate for the unmediated relationship between the individual and God, for freedom of conscience, for Puritanism. But Shaw's characterisation of her accusers is not simplistic. They are rounded, three-dimensional men, clerics and politicians with foibles and vanities; there are no villains. The Inquisitor, in particular, gives a thoughtful warning about the dangers of tolerating fanaticism, which is how Joan's behaviour appears to them.
The much-discussed Epilogue of the play, in which Joan appears and converses with her accusers, brings it into the 20th century with comic bathos and Brechtian detachment. It emphasises Shaw's point that if Joan were to appear today, she would probably be condemned as a heretic again: "Mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic." Saint Joan is not a history play as much as a comment on how little we have learned from the past; it is a plea for greater understanding of human motivation. Yet, as Shaw admitted, Joan of Arc was someone he did "not profess to understand". The way is clear for the next interpretation . . .
Saint Joan, directed by Patrick Mason, opens tonight at The Abbey.
