[In the following review, Hayes elucidates the differences between the historical accounts of Joan of Arc and the dramatic representations of her in Anouilh's The Lark and George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan.]

“Some nights, when I am feeling depressed,” Jean Anouilh has written of Joan of Arc, “I try to be rational and I say: the situation—social, political and military—was ripe for the phenomenon of Joan; a little shepherdess, one of the countless little shepherdesses who had seen the Virgin or heard voices, and who happened to be called Joan, came to fill a gap in the works, and then everything began turning.” It is this image which dominates the play Miss Lillian Hellman has drawn from Anouilh's L'Alouette, and with which Miss Julie Harris has made so palpable a hit: the image, not of “the cornered animal caught at Rouen, but the lark singing in the open sky,” brought down brokenly and in her flashing splendor by the malice of men. And it is as the lark that Joan takes her place in the company of Anouilh's celebrated heroines—young girls of a fantastic, lyrical purity and bloom—virgins all: doomed to violation by the grossness of the world's body. (Virginity, here as elsewhere in Anouilh, is of the essence: “Being a virgin is a state of grace,” Warwick says to Joan, in an explicit passage Miss Hellman has curiously chosen to mute.)

The Lark then: even the title suggests how Joan is held in Anouilh's imagination. To Shaw—who chiseled the moral image of Joan which has dominated us for three decades—she is not so much symbol as spiritual fact: the emphasis falls heavily on transcendent being: Saint Joan. It will be fruitful to consider shortly how closely these images correspond to the ‘truth’ of Joan—or reveal a reality beyond that truth—but for the moment, one might wonder at some elisions and alterations of mere fact which Anouilh and Shaw have so liberally imposed on the pattern of history. (The truth of poetry, of course, is not the truth of history, but the paradox of Joan is that she so bluntly demands justification in terms of both.) I must confess that I have not read the testimony of the original trial for condemnation, yet we are fortunate to have at hand Mme. Régine Pernoud's lately issued and absorbing account of the proceedings for Joan's rehabilitation: The Retrial of Joan of Arc (Harcourt). And after Mme. Pernoud's disinterested, irrefutable proof of Cauchon's venal and time-serving hypocrisy, are not Shaw's benignly politic cleric and Anouilh's anxious spiritual advisor inadmissible as versions of historical fact? (One may perhaps ignore the satiric treatment of Warwick: in both Shaw and Anouilh an ‘official’ personality, well-bred, blasé: in actuality, a moral terrorist and bully.) We may possibly concede some latitude to Shaw—in his calculated insolence to the twentieth century, he sought to illustrate that Joan had a fairer hearing in the Middle Ages than she would have had from us—yet there seems no justification for Anouilh.

Or consider the false abjuration (one witness tells us that Joan signed smiling in mockery); or the ‘arranged’ relapse (how, for instance, may an excommunicated heretic be permitted to receive Communion? detail not mentioned by Anouilh or Shaw); or Joan's constant appeals to have audience of the Pope (again omitted), or the squalid matter of the secular prison in which Joan was kept, the promiscuous sexual conditions of which forced her to resume the forbidden male attire. Shaw characteristically and with impertinent charm sees the issue of masculine dress as a triumph of rational good sense, and Anouilh extracts a genuine pathos out of the theme. But he also removes the sting of truth by obscuring from us the Bishop's awareness of Joan's intolerable situation: the horror lies in Cauchon's persistent denial of Joan's request for sanctuary in an ecclesiastical prison. Then again, the Inquisitor: Shaw's is mild by contrast with Anouilh's savage antagonist of “the natural man” (Miss Hellman's interpolation: the original reads ‘man’), dedicated to the inexorable domination of the Idea, hunting down and extirpating “youth, generosity, human tenderness … the uncommendable, graceless, cloudy drink of the milk of human kindness.” I perhaps need not comment on this after some centuries of Christian humanism, but there is still a small irony in the fact that it was Jean Bréhat, the Grand Inquisitor of France, who spent five years collating the testimony which would release Joan's name from its ignominy and disgrace.

Again, however, I would stress: the truths of poetry and history are distinct. Shaw gives us the first: his Joan—pert, defiant, feminist, “the born boss,” protestant, nationalist—cuts across the attitudes with which the dramatist has invested her to stand in the lonely splendor of time, victim and symbol of the tragic political nature of reality. We may cavil at this feature, dispute that posture, but Joan is not diminished—with splendid grace, she bears the weight of ideality. The image of The Lark has, on the contrary, not only lacunae of truth, but less strength and resonance and poetic reality. There are many beautiful and suggestive passages in Anouilh's drama (I am speaking of Mr. Christopher Fry's cleanly sculptured translation, which is oddly being patronized as ‘literal.’ Should not one wish to know exactly what a playwright means to say? For all her sharp sense of ‘good theater,’ Miss Hellman seems to me to have reduced the play to a genteel muddle) yet ultimately too much is burked: Joan insists: she is hard and resistant, not part of the plastic reality out of which Anouilh has shaped his several masterpieces of contemporary drama. He may have seen in her another focus through which to explore what one critic has called his dominating theme—the quest for authenticity—yet Joan's authenticity (‘the mystery of her charity’ in Péguy's phrase) has its sanction beyond time and character and the exquisite charm of that moment of national gloire (the coronation at Rheims) which is, for Anouilh, the true end of the story, “a kind of joy.”

Miss Julie Harris places Joan at the very center of this curious tapestry of medieval life: her performance—so delicate and touching and exact—is full of that special poetry of intensity which makes Miss Harris so unique and luminous a figure in our theater. This is not the visionary Joan of Claudel and Péguy, but it has something of the spendthrift audacity and vehemence of the wilful, enchanting creature we discern vaguely through the fine network of Mme. Pernoud's scholarship: the high-spirited girl who hotly matches her domestic skill against that of any housewife in Rouen; who gleefully threatens to pull the ears of the clerk who had erroneously transcribed one of her replies, and who potently flashes out at her judges: “Oh yes, you'll record anything against me all right, but you won't record anything for me.” Yet for the first time in Miss Harris' career, I feel the absence of weight and variety in her playing: what her Joan lacks is the passionate echo of the doomed girl tearing her hair in the cage of her prison, and calling on God to witness Cauchon's treachery. Beaudricourt is given an excellent reading by Mr. Theodore Bikel, and the Warwick of Mr. Christopher Plummer is masculine and adroit. As the Inquisitor, Mr. Joseph Wiseman gives his usual psychopathic performance. Mr. Joseph Anthony has animated the stage with fresh and ingenious movement, yet the production wants on the whole the fluid line of Anouilh's intention: in particular are the scenes of court life insufficiently stylized to enforce the playwright's dramatic point. Mr. Leonard Bernstein's celestial choirs rather dreadfully do not come off.

I would wish, in conclusion, to draw the attention of my readers to Mr. Eric Bentley's notice of The Lark in the New Republic of December 5: it is by far quite the most telling commentary the play has yet occasioned.