The Secret Theatre continues their ambitious agenda of dramatic masterworks, following up the recent Julius Caesar with the current production of Shaw's Saint Joan. It is a germane juxtaposition: Shaw compares Joan's fall from political grace as the rescuer of France to "the pretensions of Caesar to Cassius." It is also relevant that, to Shaw and in Shaw's work, Julius Caesar is Joan's counterpart—Caesar was Shaw's "superman," Joan, his "superwoman." And she paid the price for that.
Joan of Arc, the narrator explains, was a village girl born about 1412, burnt for heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery in 1431, rehabilitated after a fashion in 1456, canonized in 1920. Through Joan, Shaw explores issues of organized religion, nationalism, jingo patriotism as Shaw calls it, feminism, the class system—and all this before the end of the first scene. These aren't issues confined to the 15th century but are parallel to topics of today whenever anyone pushes against social norms.
The success of Saint Joan depends on, well, Saint Joan, and Shelleen Kostabi (pictured) is an excellent Maid of Orleans. She brings the right mixture of naiveté and wisdom, boyishness and femininity: all the contradictions that make up Shaw's larger-than-life, larger-than-any-one-history-or-religion's heroine. You share her joy at her successes, and when her saints seemingly desert her, you feel her internal torment.
It's not only Joan who is complicated, what with her obsession with "France for the French" and her overeagerness for things military. Complex characters are what make up Saint Joan: people who at the same time adhere to and revolt against accepted understandings of history—from the church's point of view, the state's point of view, and all through an artist's reflection. is Joan a martyr? If so, by whose hands? The questions are raised by varied characters, characters who can individually represent differing factions, even if as a whole they seem to be single-minded in their persecution of Joan.
Tim Moore as Peter Cauchon personified some of these contradictions. A Bishop in the French Catholic Church, he is vilified for being Joan's persecutor, but, as Moore sits in judgment, he exudes the kindness and patience and true caring Shaw's cleric has for the teenager. When Moore says that "his first duty is to seek this girl's salvation," you believe him. And when he is confused and angered by Joan's insistence that she gets direct messages from God, without the intercession of the Catholic Church, he becomes far from the villain that history would portray; Shaw makes him, and Mr. Moore plays him, as a committed, compassionate man, who loves his church and who makes the best decision he can under the circumstances. Shaw, raised as a Protestant in 19th century Dublin, certainly makes the case for the very real scruples of Cauchon, the Catholic ecclesiastical.
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