When George Bernard Shaw’s play was about to open at what is now the Noël Coward theatre, the critic of the Times worried that the playwright would use the story of Saint Joan as an excuse for politicking. Shaw, they wrote, “occasionally delights to criticise the present through the past”. For this unnamed critic, the appeal of Shaw’s Fabian Society moralising had worn thin.
When the same writer attended the first night in 1924, with Sybil Thorndike in the lead role, they were relieved to find GBS had played it straight: six scenes describing the progress of the Maid of Orleans from obscure teenager to army-commanding conqueror. Only in an epilogue did the playwright “let himself go” with a modern-day commentary: “It is a nuisance that he is so obsessed with the present moment as to drag it into every period.”
Just over a century later, director Stewart Laing could be subject to the same kind of speculation. In this Raw Material co-production, would Laing play games with Shaw’s play in the way he did with Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, turning James Hogg’s classic novel inside out in an elaborate hoax?
And as with Shaw, it turns out Laing’s interest in Saint Joan is entirely unironic. His modernist reimagining of the play is considerably shorter and includes the camera angles from Shaw’s unproduced film adaptation, but it is an honest engagement with the themes of religious conviction, ecclesiastical power and youthful rebellion that Joan’s story provokes.
In the lead role, newcomer Mandipa Kabanda tears through the dialogue at a pace not seen since Ivo van Hove’s More Stately Mansions, matching the other actors in urgency and drive. That all the men wear ear pieces as if syncing their lines to a recording suggests Joan is not the only one hearing voices. Why should her internal monologue be any less valid than theirs?
Laing stays true not only to Shaw’s earnest discussion, but also his politics, giving us an epilogue of our own. The concluding film by Adura Onashile juxtaposes footage of modern-day protesters with death-defying images of Kabanda calling for action: “I’d rather be remembered as the girl who set the fire.” The Times drama critic would not have approved, but surely GBS would.
• At Citizens, Glasgow, until 28 February; then touring until 21 March.
