It doesn’t take much to make the classics for the present, because that they bear the possibility in itself, makes them the classics, Yes. I had believed that George Bernard Shaw’s play “Saint Joan”, I had about twenty read, would be today, the particularly interesting part of a dusty canons. But then I saw the piece in may of last year, directed by Daniel Sullivan, at New York’s Friedman Theatre, in front of a Packed house at the peak of the “Metoo”movement. No opulent production: The stage images were reduced to hints, the costumes unobtrusive, all focused on how in the Anglo-Saxon theatre, on the performance of the actor. In the centre Condola Rashad Johanna gave a cheerful energy, a force and a sparkling intellectuality, suddenly the whole of the anarchic Potential of this writer feel.
Shaw does not allow for any authority to apply. The explosive was once liberating Potential of his pieces, but very dulled, they are still not. The Dauphin, the Johanna makes to the king, is wise, but a poor wretch, the inquisitors, and judges, are even smarter, but they are in the wrong, and Johanna is smartest of the All, but at the same time, it is in their inability to compromise, a disaster for any political System; so, who are we to think? To anyone, Shaw’s answer; nobody’s here all right, and at the same time, everyone – the king, the judge, the annoying Holy law in his own limited art.
Shaw’s style is less influenced by comic punch lines, there was far less than I had remembered – by his each line penetrating intelligence. As well as the plays of Oscar Wilde or Tom Stoppard Shaw’s works play in a parallel universe of intelligent people in the it really is all there, just no idiots. But at the same time, and also I had not noticed when reading law, Shaw is a narrator with a sense of tension and human destiny, for real happiness and true tragedy. Everyone in the theatre knew at least the basic outline of Joan’s story, and yet you sat spellbound as Condola stand Rashad unbent in front of the old men, and they were shocked and touched, as she then collapsed, and then, in turn, the offer is declined, the death in the flames of a life-long dungeon are preferable, and into the fire. It’s not often that the unfeigned Pathos gets on the stage to be right, but here it worked because the piece had been so light and funny and tingly, intellectually, that the tragic envelope had the greater force.
ambiguity
And then? I read it and I had kept the circuit for a pale sequel. The protagonists meet decades later and discuss the events. The dead Johanna savor rehabilitated, for a long time, while their judges are disgraced and punished, but instead of Triumph, they suddenly return to life. You should get up again, she asks, drawing the sword, for the Faith fight? Horrified all reject: It was great to worship Holy, but the Holy life is really no one can!
