Review: In Shaw's 'Saint Joan,' a Sane and Sensible Martyr
Jesse GreenApril 25, 2018: Who is Joan? It's harder to answer that question than to itemize who she isn't. According to George Bernard Shaw, whose 1923 play "Saint Joan" opened on Wednesday in a Manhattan Theater Club revival, the first thing she isn't is mad. The saintly voices and visions that instruct her, a medieval farm girl, to don armor and drive the English from France are merely the "dramatization by Joan's imagination" of the "evolutionary appetite." Nor is she the sorceress and strumpet Shakespeare depicts in "Henry VI, Part 1" or the romantic lass in petticoats Mark Twain imagines in his final novel, "Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc."
READ THE REVIEW