SAINT JOAN
As George Bernard Shaw makes absolutely clear in an introduction of more than 50 pages, Saint Joan is a work brimming with ideas–about the Inquisition, penal reform, Joan of Arc’s place in history, the eternal battle between clever individuals and entrenched bureaucracies. What the play lacks is a heart. And without a heart there can be no drama.
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It’s as if Shaw, writing only a few years after Joan of Arc’s canonization in 1920, became so obsessed with getting the facts of her case right that he forgot to form them into an interesting story. No wonder Kenneth Tynan called Saint Joan “the first of his plays into which senility creeps.”
In fact, of all the actors who appear in the first half of Saint Joan, only Keli Garret seems to know how not to overplay her role. If anything, her Joan seems a touch too quiet, polite, and deferential to pass for the strong-willed, divinely inspired peasant girl in soldier’s clothing, though her consistent underplaying contrasts nicely with the blustering authority figures she’s surrounded by and wins her a great deal of sympathy.
Set in Chicago, this muddled reworking of the Brecht-Weill flop musical Happy End concerns a manipulative businessman named Mauler who runs afoul of a do-gooder named Joan Dark and ultimately loses both the world and his soul. Brecht’s rhetorical intent is clear early on–he wants to skewer both capitalists and well-meaning charities–but his play is at once painfully obvious (all the businessmen dress and act like gangsters) and annoyingly obtuse (we’re never sure whether Dark is a saint, a fool, or a willing dupe of the capitalist system).
