A fresh theatrical production of St Joan claims that Bernard Shaw’s play is now “relevant to our time”. But the story of Joan of Arc is relevant to all time, and the Donmar’s drama (which will be streamed into 2,500 cinemas for all to see on March 14) portrays Joan as a feminist icon.
This too is nothing new. Joan has always been a striking role model for young women – illuminating the courage, affirmativeness, confidence and unwavering holiness of a young girl of only 17 who led the armies of France and faced her own martyrdom fearlessly.
Each age interprets St Joan in its own way, and predictably the current production – with the film actress Gemma Arterton playing Joan – duly reflects the fashionable views of our contemporary intelligentsia. Nasty male bankers, political warmongers and Daily Mail-reading nationalists are now the villains in a modernised setting, and the play’s director, Josie Rourke, seems to imply that were she alive today Joan would be leading the protests against Brexit and Trump populism.
Because we live in a secularised age, I feel that modern theatricals don’t quite understand what Joan was all about in the way that Shaw understood – and explained in his brilliant preface to his own play (first performed in 1924, soon after Joan’s canonisation).
Shaw, who was an Irish Protestant, claimed that Joan was the first genuinely “Protestant” saint, and that a core cause that she advanced was, actually, nationalism. Nationalism, says GBS, is basically Protestant. Joan thought French people should be French, rather than Catholic Europeans. “She objected to foreigners on the sensible ground that they were not in their proper place in France,” he writes, “but she had no notion of how this brought her into conflict with Catholicism and Feudalism, both essentially international.”
If we follow Shaw’s thinking, Joan of Arc would today be supporting the Front National in France (and the spirit of nationalism elsewhere), rather than disdaining the cause of the nation-state.
Although we don’t have to follow Shaw’s thinking in all details, his admiration for Joan is inspiring. He called her a true visionary and a great war leader, who had the genius of a Napoleon or a Wellington in deploying military tactics. Her devotion to St Catherine was sincere and sane, he says, and her desire to wear the male attire of a soldier entirely rational.
St Joan is such a stunning play that, however interpreted, nothing can destroy the heroism of Joan of Arc, as portrayed by Shaw. If she is indeed an icon for our times, maybe we should make more of her feast day on May 30.
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The public spotlight has fallen on two troubled conjugal unions over the past week or so: in one case, a judge withheld a divorce from Mrs Tini Owens, aged 65, who after 37 years of marriage described herself as feeling “unloved, isolated and alone”. Her husband, Hugh, aged 78, depicted as being “old school”, would not agree to a divorce, and so the Appeal Court saw no grounds for granting it.
For this decision, the law was lambasted by commentators, especially women. A person should be able to walk away from a marriage once they decide it’s unhappy, is the contemporary view.
Contracts and vows count for little, as they are seldom mentioned. Mr Owens has been disparaged for holding the supposed antediluvian attitude that “for better, for worse” means what it says (although newspaper reports suggest that he might have tried harder to be a more warm-hearted husband).
The second broken union in the public gaze is indeed more modern: it concerns the TV inquisitor Jeremy Paxman, who according to media reports has left his partner of 35 years, and the mother of his three children, for another relationship: they were not married, so there were no vows to break and divorce doesn’t arise. But we are told that grief and heartbreak do. Understandably.
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Roy Hattersley, who has written a big book about the history of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland, says that “If you’re a Catholic, you have no doubts about anything.” What? The most saintly Catholics – look at Mother Teresa of Calcutta – are wracked with doubts. Perhaps Lord Hattersley is confusing certainty with commitment.
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