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.”
