First Co Mplete Recording of Sha W's Saint Joan

--•-• ENT ERTA I N than Orleans, she is on her own terms precisely the coaxer and the hustler, the born boss at ease among all classes, that Shaw intended. If anything, she surpasses FIRST COMPLETE RECORDING her own fierce Joan of the prize-winning 1956 New York OF SHA W'S SAINT JOAN Phoenix Theatre production. Sackler, as usual, makes all move with the precision and flow of music, weaving voices of varying pitch and weight to save the texture of A glittering cast under director Howard Sackler makes the most of an eloquent script a wordy script from the slightest monotony. The high treble of Robert Stephen's petulant, spoiled Dauphin con- trasts superbly with the serene eloquence of Jeremy Brett's EORGE BERNARD SHAW wrote his play about Joan of Dunois, the good-natured and capable commander whom Arc at the time she was canonized by the Catholic G Joan urges to action against the British. Sir Felix Ayl- Church in 1921. The church granted her sainthood and mer's rightous Bishop of Beauvais, Donald Pleasence's immortality; the playwright restored her to humanity. authoritarian Inquisitor, and Nigel Davenport's expansive "We may accept and admire Joan," he wrote in his pref- but businesslike Warwick offer model examples in the ace to the play, "as a sane and shrewd country girl of art of turning set speeches into the explosive stuff of ting- extraordinary strength of mind and hardihood of body. ling theater. Accompanying the records is enough mate- Everything she did was thoroughly calculated; and though rial to supply a conscientious student with the makings of the process was so rapid that she was hardly conscious of a Ph.D. on the subject: the playwright's whole lengthy it, and ascribed it all to her voices, she was a woman of preface, a complete text, a solemn analysis by Eric Bent- policy and not of blind impulse." On stage, she is a sassy, ley, and photos of just about every heroine who ever sober girl, insolent, practical, and stubborn. When she played the title role— Winifred Lenihan, Dame Sybil leads the French forces to raise the siege of Orleans and Thorndike, Katharine Cornell, and Uta Hagen among save the power of the self-pitying, weak Dauphin, she them. Paul Krell; shows herself as a shrewd politician and plucky soldier, eager for battle and revenge against the English. As a ® 0 GEORGE BERNARD SHA W: Saint Joan. Siobhan Shavian heroine, she is neither romantic nor sentimental. McKenna, Donald Pleasence, Felix Aylmer, Robert Stephens, And perhaps because of the author's lifelong quarrel with Jeremy Brett, Alec McCowen, Nigel Davenport, others. Shakespeare, whose Joan in Henry VI, Part One is a witch Howard Sackler, director. CAEDMON THEATRE RECORDING SOCIETY 311 four discs stereo or mono $23.80. and promiscuous wanton, Shaw's Joan is sexless. Yet she's tremendously human and vital. SIORHAN MCKENNA As the action moves from the scenes of military victory A Kilkenny Joan precisely as Shaw intended to the court where her inquisitors doom her to burn at the stake, the deep nature of the tragedy becomes clear: Joan's quarrel is not just with the English but with all the forces of reaction and oppression. Her war is the war of the individual genius against the established order. She does not seek martyrdom; she is willing to confess anything rather than be tortured and kept behind bars. She can- not understand the obtuseness of her judges nor the treachery of her own voices which have assured her she will be released. She rescinds her confession only when she learns that she is to be shut away "from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers." The stake is preferable to confinement. Shaw's judges are not drawn as fools; they are shown as rational men by the light of their own principles—never monsters. Indeed, all the characters who flank Joan in the play are believable peo- ple rather than cardboard mouthpieces as in lesser his- torical dramas. This makes every role in St. Joan a prize for an actor. The new Caedmon Theatre Recording Society release is the first recorded version of the complete play, and a glittering cast makes the most of every opportunity. If Siobhan McKenna's Joan seems more a maid of Kilkenny 58 .

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