Recent viewings

Saint Joan. Play by George Bernard Shaw, performed by Shaw Festival players in Niagara on the Lake.

This is one of those plays that somehow got printed in one of my school textbooks years ago, despite its intellectually subversive content. I read it instead of what the class was supposed to be reading. That happened a lot.

I was impressed, at the time, by the relentlessly analytical and evenhanded approach which Shaw, that famous Bad Boy of early 20th century English theater, takes toward his subject. His subject, of course, is the famous Joan of Arc, the religiously-inspired peasant girl who rallied the French to several notable military victories against the occupying English in the 15th century, and was eventually captured, tried, and executed by those same English. Although I'm hardly competent to evaluate theatrical performances, I find that seeing the play performed live does at the very least remind me why I found it so interesting in print.

On the one hand, Shaw's Joan is sincere and devout. In the beginning she is deferential both to the established Church and its representatives, and to the political ruler whom she believes to be appointed by God to rule the French, even as it becomes clear to the audience that both of them see her as a dangerous nuisance once she has exhausted her immediate usefulness to them. Joan is sympathetic, attractive, well-intentioned and well-spoken. Her devotion to God, and the arguments that she makes for local, nationalistic self-governance, are appealing. And yet Shaw throws in some troubling reflections on her ideas, as well.

The example of a certain Arab camel-herder, who also claimed to receive special individual revelations from God, is invoked by one character as he argues that visionaries like Joan are threats to the peace and good order of the world. Modern-day "visionaries" like David Koresh and Jim Jones remind the modern viewer that this fear is well-founded in every age. One of the characters in the play gets a laugh by complaining that individuals like Joan, who wish to deal with God directly rather than through a priestly or churchly mediator, are always "protesting" about something. "I would almost call them protest-ants," he says, and the audience chuckles. But it's not entirely a humorous moment, since Shaw clearly has in mind that this is exactly what the later Protestant Reformation was about, both for good and for ill.

Joan's rather simplistic ethnic nationalism still resonates in everything from racist nativist movements to anti-colonial revolts to "ethnic cleansing", and Shaw, writing shortly after the horrific bloodbaths of the First World War, could hardly have avoided seeing such nationalistic concepts as ill-starred.

The play's well worth seeing. Shaw has some fun with the idea of the Catholic Church first denouncing Joan as a heretic, then canonizing her as a saint a few centuries later, but he plays fair in terms of presenting the real and serious conflicts that surround any claims of personal divine revelation or of ethnically-based nationalism.