[In the following review, Bentley unfavorably compares Anouilh's portrayal of Joan of Arc in The Lark to George Bernard Shaw's conception of the Catholic heroine.]

In 1890 Shaw complained of Bernhardt as Joan of Arc: “she intones her lines and poses like a saint.” At the time, Joan was hovering uncomfortably between heaven and earth. Subsequently she was split in two: one half sent to heaven by the church and called, indeed, a saint, the other half brought rudely down to earth by our playwrights. It is this second Joan—named “natural man” by Miss Hellman's inquisitor—which Julie Harris has been called upon to play. Who is better qualified? She is the very idea of a modern actress. The Times recently published a photo to demonstrate that, on 42nd street, Miss Harris looks just like one of the crowd. Imagine what Sarah would say to that! But she would, at least partly, be wrong. In the first place, being the ordinary person has its advantages. No intoning, no posing like a saint. Julie Harris can convince you that this girl is indeed the daughter of the rustic couple of Domremy. In the second place, the ordinariness is only a mask. When Miss Harris takes it off, you see that she is beautiful, glamorous, and powerfully attractive. And she has learned to make subtle use of a wiry, expressive body and the stage-space surrounding it. Her performance as Joan [in The Lark] has many lovely and touching moments from the first tableau where she sits in despair with her head in her hands to the last where she stands erect and smiles her oval, homey, midwestern smile. Presumably with the help of her director, Joseph Anthony, than whom no one has a more daring sense of movement, she is able to say more with her body than one would have believed possible in so very verbal a play. No actress' Joan is likely to be complete. Under any director, speaking any script, Miss Harris' otherworldiness would always be more elfin than saintly, her belligerency rather that of Peter Pan than of a patriot and military strategist. But the greatest limitation—a lack of range, of variety—is imposed by the script.

Like Shaw, Anouilh has come to the life of Joan of Arc from a feeling that here was all that he had been trying to say in his previous plays. Shaw was right: the confrontation here of individual and society, intuition and philosophy, conscience and convention, vitality and system is Shavian theatre in a nutshell. And, prima facie, the Anouilh pattern also fits: here is another of those clear-eyed virgins whom a world of weary or wicked men takes and destroys. Well and good—provided that the playwright is interested in this kind of virgin and this kind of destroyer—is interested, that is to say, in religion and politics. Shaw fills Joan with his own religious sense, and interprets her career according to his own view of history: she was the first nationalist and the first protestant. Anouilh's lack of interest in such matters is total. He tells us that the Joan of history was a big, healthy girl but that he couldn't care less and his Joan is going to be weary, undernourished, and haggard. We are meant to understand, no doubt, that this author is after dramatic essences, not factual externals. But what is undramatic about a big raw-boned peasant lass? Is it not the weariness and emaciation that are unreal, the children, not of truth, but of Anouilh's philosophic system?

Admittedly, Shaw also gave us a highly personal view of Joan, which departs from the facts in at least one essential point, namely, in representing the trial as scrupulously fair. To this end, Shaw gave an inquisitor argument such as no inquisitor would ever (I think) have approved, let alone employed, and made Bishop Cauchon amiable and rational. Anouilh not only presents another highly personal interpretation, however, he also follows the Shavian version of the facts as if it were established history. Indeed, one of the New York reviewers excused his following in Shaw's footsteps on the grounds that it all really happened that way! At this point it is high time—if Catholic critics are too polite to speak out about Anouilh—that a Catholic dramatist should write a Joan play and remind the public, first, that the trial was as shameless and corrupt a frame-up as anything in Soviet annals and that, as for character, Bishop Cauchon was in all probability about as likeable, enlightened, and highminded as Senator McCarthy. We allow Shaw a certain license, partly because he came up with a fine play, partly because what he said has general application even if it is not specifically true of Joan. Anouilh can claim no such indulgence. Rather, one has the right to complain that in this the least imaginative of his dramas he also displays so little interest in the truth—the truth about Catholicism, for example. His inquisitor says: “love of man excludes the love of God”! It is true that a priest protests, but he is sent out of the room for his pains. It is true an attempt is made to make the inquisitor symbolize all who fanatically put an Idea before people. My points stand, a fortiori, that the play moves all the time away from concrete truth and towards abstract theory. And the theory is not very good theory. As a thinker, Anouilh has the narrow-mindedness we traditionally associate with the religious; only it's the fact that his mind contains no religion that makes him narrow. In vain that he tries in his play suddenly to be Positive and celebrate human goodness. The enthusiasm is voulu and unfelt. Real is only the old, comfortless, nauseated atheism. Despite his intentions, his Joan is a character reduced to his pattern, and (in the French original) dies chiefly to avoid the coming of old age.

This last was more than Miss Hellman could stomach. By a brief deletion, she desperately tries, in the last scene, to rescue Joan from Anouilh. She inserts a little speech of her own to guarantee that Joan, lost to sainthood à la Bernhardt, may be at least a good girl. She goes back into the body of the text and slashes the inquisitor's speeches so that our audiences will never find out what Anouilh meant to convey. Meanwhile, the producer has Leonard Bernstein turn on the phonograph at awkward moments (hark the metallic angels sing), otherwise chiefly relying on a director whose whole talent lies in what may be called dramatic choreography. Anouilh's conception was scenically very simple: his play is a discussion, and that's that. The New York production is a really grand show—visually much finer than Tiger at the Gates, for example—a show which, with Julie Harris in the midst of it, anyone interested in theatre will enjoy, especially those who are not interested in Joan of Arc, history in particular, or truth in general.