Shaw's masterpiece
November 2001
SF Weekly
Burning Joan
JOAN OF ARC burned as a witch when a church inquisition accused her of heresy in 1431, but over 500 years her image improved, until the same church canonized her in 1920. Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan shortly afterwards. He meant it as a tonic against the romance over Joan that was current at the time -- the soft-focus notion of a pretty farm girl guided by voices to the command of a national French army, a prophet-virgin in armor destroyed by the corrupt (and personally-offended) functionaries of Rome. "For these slanders of the Church and the Inquisition there is not a shred of evidence in the records of the trial," Shaw wrote in a program note to an early performance of Saint Joan. "She was burnt for heresy because she was guided by her inner light to the position taken two hundred years later by the Society of Friends." She was a proto-Protestant, in other words. The bishops were just doing their jobs. And -- more to the point -- modern leaders of church and state would have passed the same verdict in 1920, faced with another prophet. Burning Joan wasn't a terrific scandal of corruption and lies, Shaw wanted to say: It was simply the way of the world.
The Aurora Theater has inaugurated its new stage in Berkeley with an ambitiously small-scale Saint Joan. The Aurora did well by Shaw in its previous home at the Berkeley City Club, but Saint Joan is the sprawling masterpiece that wouldn't have fit in that tiny room. It's a tribute not just to a medieval military genius who died in her teens but also a defense of theater -- and art -- as a kind of prophecy. Shaw identified with anyone who trusted an inner vision ahead of outside authority. He claimed to write that way himself, from flashes of divine inspiration. But he never believed, for a second, that Joan had military advice from dead saints. "She must be judged a sane woman in spite of her voices because they never gave her any advice that might not have come to her from her mother wit exactly as gravitation came to Newton," he wrote. The play is a defense of visions and voices as a super-rational process, and as a fountainhead of art. Still, it's an awkward show to watch in the months after September 11. Emily Ackerman, who plays Joan in the current production, explained the context to me in an interview: "Joan is jihad. She was fighting a war for God." The French generals were losing badly to the British when she filled their demoralized soldiers with a hot sense of God and country. One of her prosecutors in the play asks: "What do her victories prove but that the courage of faith, even though it be a false faith, will always outstay the courage of wrath?" That line makes my skin crawl. Barbara Oliver's production at the Aurora doesn't belabor these overtones. It's a straight, simple show, unsurprising to anyone who knows the script. It's also three hours long and packed with conversation about theology and French politics from around 1430. (There are moments of tedium.) But the core actors in the show are so strong that the behemoth play tends to cruise ahead even when you think it's ready to stall. First, there's W. Francis Walters, who plays a cringing steward as well as the Monsignor Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais. As the steward he looks like William Shawn, whining and nervous; but as Cauchon he becomes a stern, speechifying, half-deaf prince of the church, with a well-practiced withering gaze. His head actually quivers as he talks, with the beginnings of senile palsy, and his speeches have a grim power. (Cauchon is the one who compares the courage of faith with the courage of wrath.) L. Peter Callender also does brilliant work as Dunois, "the Bastard of Orleans," and the Inquisitor. As Dunois he's an eager young general impressed by Joan's innocent fervor; as the Inquisitor he's another thing completely, a wily, aging, cruel, but correct church scholar who condemns Joan without personal malice or even a lapse in courtesy. Paul Silverman plays a pitch-perfect Dauphin, the rightful king, Charles VII who lacks the guts to claim his crown until Joan insists on it for the sake of France. He's a highstrung, whiny young man in a sacklike outfit and felt head-covering with long strings hanging down: an excitable teenager in pajamas. Silverman plays him with the right knowledgeable but cracking voice, as if he knows he's being pushed around by the bishops and feudal lords of France, but can't help it. (Jeez.) And then there's Ackerman, as Joan. She always does well as colorfully-accented characters, like Prossy in Shaw's Candida or Maggie MacNeil in The Glace Bay Miners' Museum; here she has to play a plain girl whose whole strength is a scrappy but earnest faith in God. With no accent to lean on she sometimes resorts to a high tone that doesn't seem right for a farm girl; her Joan is not quite as commonsensical as Shaw intended the character to be (or as Shaw was himself) — but her speeches. Ackerman nails the speeches. The whole play might exist for the climactic tantrum where Joan tears up her apology to the church and essentially throws herself on the fire to avoid the Inquisitor's mercy of a prison sentence. "To shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain my feet so that I can never again ride with the soldiers nor climb the hills ... Without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God." The speech is like a strenuous happy passage of music from Siegfried, or a defiant Dylan song: It's Shaw's declaration of independence, which Ackerman renders with a beautiful, tragic, burning zeal.
Michael Scott Moore
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