This Day in Theater History (Shaw’s ‘Saint Joan’ Hailed as Career Zenith)

Dec. 28, 1923—Even though critics had derided the most recent play of George Bernard Shaw as too verbose and long, the Anglo-Irish playwright’s new comedy-drama was in much the same vein: Saint Joan, which premiered at New York’s Garrick Theatre.

Instead of driving audiences away, however, the six-act (with epilogue), 3½ hour comedy-drama-historical epic about Joan of Arc proved to be a great success. It was acclaimed as the capstone of his nearly three-decade career as a dramatist, propelling him towards the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

At the same time, this success boosted the faith of the playwright in—as well as the box-office take of— the most influential producing company of the 1920s and 1930s, the Theatre Guild, which became the major American sponsor of new work by not only Shaw but also emerging homegrown dramatists such as Eugene O’Neill, Philip Barry, Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, Sidney Howard, and William Saroyan.

The Guild—which pioneered the subscription plan as a means of assuring a constant stream of avid playgoers more disposed to experimental, challenging fare—had done well with Shaw's Heartbreak House in 1920. But with Back to Methusaleh, a five-play series that represented the closest the playwright came to science fiction, the company lost $20,000—a failure that Shaw attributed to the Guild's management rather than to himself.

In contrast, the Guild's board of directors was more enthusiastic about Saint Joan. But, as the play approached its premiere, the board became concerned that the same issues that plagued its predecessor would hinder the success of this new entry. 

More was riding on the American success of the dramatist whose wife playfully nicknamed "The Genius." The London production of Saint Joan, starring one of Shaw’s favorite actresses, Sybil Thorndike, ended up being delayed until March 1924, so the Guild’s staging became the de facto world premiere, and news about its effectiveness would be transmitted overseas.

As was his wont, Shaw conducted his business with the American theater from across the Atlantic Ocean. 

Despite the importance of America to Shaw’s long-term commercial viability (it represented his largest source of income from 1894 to his death in 1950), the playwright did not visit the nation until 1933, and in general regarded it, according to L. W. Conolly’s Bernard Shaw on the American Stage, with “a toxic mix of contempt and mockery."

Alhough Katharine Cornell, fast acquiring a reputation as one of the greatest American stage actresses, passed on this initial production, the Guild board of directors ended up delighted with the blue-eyed Brooklyn beauty who took on the title role: Winifred Lenihan, who made of it a career triumph.

First after the dress rehearsal, then again after opening night, the Guild noticed that some attendees, especially from the suburbs, were departing early. Their initial cables urged Shaw to cut some of the dialogue to reduce that, but they received no reply. 

Only after the company management prevailed on the 25-year-old Lenihan to send her own cable with a similar request did the playwright respond. They might not have wished they had sent all these messages when they saw Shaw's follow-up.

To Ms. Lenihan, the playwright’s cable was short and ironic: “THE GUILD IS SENDING ME TELEGRAMS IN YOUR NAME. PAY NO ATTENTION TO THEM.” The organization’s management must have winced at his longer, more lacerating letter to them: “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves for getting a young actress into trouble with an author like that…. You have wasted a whole morning for me with your panic-stricken nonsense, confound you!”

In the end, it didn’t matter: the public ignored reviewers who complained about the length by purchasing tickets. Despite his waspish transatlantic exchanges with the Theatre Guild's management, Shaw elected to stay with it as the principal American agent for his plays, with a total of 15 plays under its aegis.

Although Shaw wrote over 60 plays, Saint Joan ranks among his most popular, probably trailing only Pygmalion (which has the benefit of not only inspiring the musical My Fair Lady, but is also logistically easier to mount, with fewer characters and sets).

Over the centuries, Joan has provided fodder for a lengthy parade of novelists and dramatists, including William Shakespeare, Voltaire, Friedrich Schiller, Mark Twain, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Anouilh, and others. But it’s Shaw’s depiction that has captured the popular imagination the most.

In the early postwar period, Saint Joan exerted an unusual appeal for colonial audiences that, like France in Joan’s time, was feeling the stirrings of nationalism. 

Yet even then, in the McCarthy period, it was also seen as a broadside against intolerance, and more recently has appealed to those who sympathize with her plight at the hands of men who hope to squash what Shaw ironically termed “unwomanly and insufferable presumption.”

It is a curious fact of Joan of Arc’s posthumous appeal that two religious skeptics like Twain and Shaw could be so powerfully drawn to the story of this saint. Leave aside the odd contention, in Shaw’s preface to the play, that Joan was “one of the first Protestant martyrs.”

Remember instead: the recollection of Theatre Guild founder Lawrence Langner, in his 1963 memoir, GBS and the Lunatic, that Shaw attributed the enormous speed with which he wrote the play to Joan herself: “As I wrote, she guided my hand, and the words came tumbling out at such a speed that my pen rushed across the paper and I could barely write fast enough to put them down."

In 1934, Shaw predicted correctly, “It is quite likely that sixty years hence, every great English and American actress will have a shot at ‘Saint Joan,’ just as every great actor will have a shot at Hamlet.”

 Among those who have played Shaw’s version of the Maid of Orleans: Katharine Cornell (catching it on the rebound), Wendy Hiller, Zoe Atkins, Judi Dench, Uta Hagen, Joan Plowright, Lynn Redgrave, and Kim Stanley.

I myself have seen two productions: one at Manhattan's Paley Center for Media, a 1967 "Hallmark Hall of Fame" TV presentation starring Genevieve Bujold; the other a 2018 Manhattan Theatre Club performance with Condola Rashad in the title role. 

Both productions shortened the text—an eventuality that Shaw dourly predicted in the preface to the play, when he noted that "well intentioned but disastrous counsellors" would have their way "when I am no longer in control of the performing rights."

Quote of the Day (George Bernard Shaw, on How ‘The Loneliness of God is His Strength’)

“Do not think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone; and God is alone; and what is my loneliness before the loneliness of my country and my God? I see now that the loneliness of God is His strength: what would He be if He listened to your jealous little counsels? Well, my loneliness shall be my strength too; it is better to be alone with God; His friendship will not fail me, nor His counsel, nor His love. In His strength I will dare, and dare, and dare, until I die.”—Anglo-Irish playwright (and Nobel Literature laureate) George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Saint Joan (1920)

The image accompanying this post shows Canadian actress Genevieve Bujold in the title role of Saint Joan, in the Hallmark Hall of Fame TV production from 1967.

Theater Review: Bernard Shaw’s ‘Saint Joan,’ Presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club

Saint Joan, which closes on Broadway on Sunday, arrived when the nearly century-old tragicomedy by George Bernard Shaw could be seen in a new light. This has less to do with the production capably but not sensationally mounted by the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), and more with the gender warfare of the moment.

You want a leader constantly having to face down men who underestimate or even condescend to her? Well, here is one who truly, to borrow the favorite verb of Mitch McConnell, “persisted”—whether by leading an army to victory on the battlefield or by being burned at the stake.

Despite themselves, even battle-hardened, cynical French soldiers realize that there is, as a few put it in the first act, “something about her.”

In one of the six scenes of this nearly three-hour play, Shaw has two adversaries--a French Cardinal and an English earl with precious little interest in religion--move toward an unexpected alliance through their mutual interest in stopping an even more unlikely common enemy, a French teenage farm girl, Joan of Lorraine. The adolescent—better known to posterity as St. Joan of Arc—threatens them as the representative of two new forces in history, what the Anglo-Irish playwright, in a case of puckish anachronism, terms “nationalism” and “Protestantism.”

The Archbishop of Rheims observes, not without anxiety, that “there is a new spirit rising in man; we are at the dawning of a wider epoch.” Joan, as the unwitting emblem of that "new spirit," is a threat to the medieval power structure.

But, while Shaw’s initial listeners might have nodded in agreement at that scene, as well as Shaw's observations on the cluelessness of career male military leaders (who had, only a few years before, sent countless young men to their death in WWI) and on intolerance. 

But the prime movers at the MTC are far more interested in a different struggle taking place after intermission. This struggle involves Joan, a woman of strength and determination who had lifted the siege of Orleans, now finding her strategy of carrying the flight to the English questioned anew by the men who had scoffed at her initial plan to raise the siege of Orleans in the Hundred Years' War.

As Joan, Condola Rashad has the only major female role in Shaw’s play. (Mandi Masden, playing the Duchess de la Tremouille, is on and off quickly.) She must interact with 17 different male actors and, as Joan, contend with each of them. Her Tony Award nomination is well-deserved, as she conveys the simplicity and purity that are at once the source of her strength in leading men to victory and of her endangerment in an ecclesiastical court shadowed by power politics.

Though Tony voters have singled out Rashad, a couple of other cast members also deserved consideration: Jack Davenport, as the cynical power player Earl of Warwick, and Patrick Page, making the most of two roles: the strutting military peacock Capt. Robert de Baudricourt and The Inquisitor, an ecclesiastical judge as intent that Joan receive a fair trial as he is fanatical in insisting that the charges against her are in and of themselves worthy of invoking the death penalty. 

I had forgotten just how long this play can be, no doubt because the only prior version I saw—a 1967 Hallmark Hall of Fame special, with Geneviève Bujold in the title role—clocked in at a TV-friendly two hours. Brooking no criticism for straining playgoers’ and critics’ preferences for shorter fare than the 3 1/2 hours he projected, Shaw airily noted in his preface to the play that “'what matters is not the absolute length of time occupied by a play, but the speed with which that time passes.”

Director Daniel Sullivan has steered a middle course between the playwright’s demands and the audience’s desire for different play lengths, bringing in the production at two hours and 45 minutes. He’s also added touches that bolster his interpretation without being inimical to the playwright’s intention (e.g., Page as Baudricourt confronts Joan bare-chested in an empty attempt to overwhelm her with machismo).  

But Shaw does Sullivan no favors with his dialogue-heavy text. Walter Bobbie (who plays the Bishop of Beauvais, Cauchon) noted, in a thoughtful post-show “talk back,” that Shaw was a “narrative essayist” who planted surprising theatrical touches in what were essentially dramas of ideas.

But much of the early going—particularly the scenes between Cauchon and Warwick, and between Joan and the soldier Dunois—consisted of static standoffs. It was only in the second half of the play, when Joan realizes she won’t have the support of the men she championed and, after her capture, goes on trial for heresy, that the full dramatic potential of the play as mounted by the MTC is achieved.