Theatre
Either, Or and the Holy Both
By ALAN BRIEN IT is not surprising that Shaw's St. Joan should be far more moving to a muddled agnostic like me than to any pious Catholic. Just so an honest and forthright play on the life of Karl Marx would seem far more tragic to a disillusioned radical like me than to a strict party-liner. After all, to those who believe in either religion, Joan was recompensed for being roasted alive by her elevation to heaven with the Saints, and Marx's bitter, cold, lonely life was justified by the establishment of the Soviet paradise on earth. To the faithful, both sad stories have a happy ending. What is impres- sive- about Shaw's achievement in St. Joan is that he equally refuses to turn his romantic-tragic- comedy (his own analysis of its progression) into a rationalist tract. The Archbishop and the Inquisi- tor are not sadistic monsters in the grip of a degrading superstition. Shaw, as Eric Bentley has pointed out, aims to give us a broad, generous, humane view of life under the banner of Both/And. Despite all his schoolboyish dogma- tism, his provocative generalisations, his flood of anathema, he avoids the narrow insistence of an Either/Or choice.
St. Joan has survived several barrages from the scholars and precisians. The anachronisms, inaccuracies, confusions of fact and fancy, have long ago been listed by those who thought he was unfair to the Church and by those who thought he was over-favourable to the Church. Shavians usually defend their hero by arguing that he was above petty details and the slavery of research. They can quote his own words-1 never collect authorities nor investigate condi- tions. I just deduce what happened and why it happened from my flair for human nature, know- ing that if necessary I can find plenty, of docu- ments,.and witnesses to bear me out in any pos- sible conclusion.' But this is little more than a Shavian squib. In St. Joan, Shaw read some of the records of the trial for his basic situation and then searched through the legends for the sodes and anecdotes which suited his theme. He chose deliberately to create his play about the Saint rather than the real Joan. The farmer's daughter is dead—the daughter of the Church lives on.
Like Shakespeare, like Brecht, he does not really care what happened to historical charac- ters in a historical situation. He simply takes the popular myth of the past and then over-prints it with the dramatic patterns, the dialectical images, which were branded in his own mind. St. Joan omits the more grisly barbarities of the execution —for instance, the executioner lighting Joan's dress first so that she was shown naked and alive to the mob. Both the anti-clerical and pro-clerical propagandist would have taken pains to blacken Joan's judges. Shaw wants to show two opposing views of life, both reasonable, both inevitable, clashing head on. He hiniself, and the society which created him, was split between authori- tarianism and individualism, between order and freedom, between tradition and experiment. St. Joan is an objective projection of the dilemma.
In this aim he was not entirely successful. There is a tension in between the two irreconcil- able opposites. But he has made the judges too donnishly reasonable and his Joan too innocently sentimental. The gap is too great and I find that easy tears and obvious laughs obscure for me what should be the naked, ruthless, uncompromis- ing drive of the play he did not quite write.
At the Old Vic, Douglas Seale has given St. Joan a clean, unfussy, well-spoken, manly pro- duction. The romantic opening scenes, by far the weakest part of the play, get off with a run and a jump as they suddenly flare up out of the darkness as if they had been repeating themselves in limbo every night for six hundred years, Apart from Joss Ackland's Cardinal dressed up and made up like a panto dame, and George Baker's juvenile lead of a Warwick, everybody looks right enough. Robert Harris and Walter Hudd. as Cauchon and the Inquisitor, have the correct, weary, patient air of a pair of schoolmasters per- suading a backward pupil to construe. Alec McCowen cannot go wrong with the Dauphin— as sharp, and cute, and knowing as a pet dachs- hund let loose in the servants' quarters of Buck- ingham Palace. But perhaps the best acting came in those small parts which can so easily be carica- tured—John Moffat as the good priest turned crooked through lack of imagination, John Stride as the humane young monk who sees too far into the future for his own piece of mind, and Gerald James as the common soldier whose com- monness saved him from the vices of his wise and holy superiors.
Barbara Jefford's Joan is a difficult perform- ance to analyse. I found it intolerably affecting far more so than Siobhan McKenna's fiery, fluent, dangerous IRA commandant. Miss McKenna might be trapped and tried and burned. But she plunged into the maelstrom with her eyes open. She knew she was about to become a Saint. We believed it because she believed it. We felt exhilaration and excitement but no tears. Miss Jefford plays the part the way Shaw actually wrote it (as distinct from the way Shaw thought he had written it). The softness, the pliability. the defencelessness of the girl born to be raped or martyred, has pathos rather than tragedy. If she had tried to be the teenage Boadicea, she would have been playing against the text and against her nature. To me, her Joan was all the more heart-rending because I felt that she was unsure of her life after death, and so was I.
The critics who have seen Joans in their dozens may give her lower marks. But for me she added an extra dimension beyond Shaw's conscious intention. Barbara Jefford was a girl who lived for her country but who died for—nothing. She, unfortunately, is not in heaven. And her mur- derers, even more unfortunately, are not in hell.
Previous page
