That sense of never-say-die epitomizes this energetic and vivid production.

She’s nothing if not relentless: “You should only attack,” she tells Gray Powell’s Dunois, “and if you hold on long enough the enemy will stop first.” The character is referring to the famous French victory at Orleans, but Topham could just as easily be referring to her approach to playing this iconic role. At the center of it all is actress Sara Topham, whose defiant Joan is a plucky, determined, and unwavering heroine. The eloquence of Shaw’s language is just part of what makes the production so memorable. But, in the capable hands of Carroll, his creative team, and The Shaw Festival’s excellent company of actors, this production pulls off being both a refreshingly contemporary experience and a Shavian delight. The poetry of Saint Joan is undeniable and, almost a hundred years on, challenging to audiences raised on the terse chatter in TV and movies. The script most likely led to him being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925, “for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty.” He seized on this as an opportunity for an iconoclastic re-envisioning of the figure and it was a success. Shaw’s masterpiece, first performed in 1923, was written just three years after Joan d’Arc was canonized. In his program notes, director Tim Carroll confesses that he selected Saint Joan as his premiere production as the Shaw Festival’s Artistic Director because of the poetry in this historical epic. This edition has an introduction by Simon Mundy, who has spent several years as Vice-President of PEN International’s Writers for Peace Committee, and extensive explanatory notes.Steven Sutcliffe as Captain La Hire and Sara Topham as Joan in the Shaw Festival Production of “Saint Joan.” Photo: David Cooper.

Eliot was outraged, saying, ‘instead of the saint or the strumpet of the legends… he has turned her into a great middle-class reformer.’ Nonetheless – or perhaps even because of this controversy – Saint Joan is considered one of Shaw’s finest and most important plays. It was an immediate success, securing him the Nobel Prize for Literature, although critics were initially divided by this frank approach – T.S. The life of fifteenth-century heroine Joan of Arc is the stuff of legend, and her cruel death (burnt at the stake aged just nineteen) led to her being declared a martyr, granting her an extraordinary legacy.įollowing her canonisation in 1920, and against a history of overly romanticised retellings of the story, Bernard Shaw put pen to paper to give a more accurate account, without resorting to demonising her persecutors as he writes in his preface, ‘there are no villains in the piece’.

Saint joan by george bernard shaw