But without these things I cannot live and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God.
I could do without my warhorse I could drag about in a skirt I could let the banners and the trumpets and the knights and soldiers pass me and leave me behind as they leave the other women, if only I could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind. But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers to chain my feet so that I can never again ride with the soldiers nor climb the hills to make me breathe foul damp darkness and keep from me everything that brings me back to the love of god when your wickedness and foolishness tempt me to hate Him:all this is worse than the furnace in the bible that was heated seven times. Bread has no sorrow for me, and water no affliction. It is not the bread and water I fear: I can live on bread:when have I asked for more? It is no hardship to drink water if the water be clean. You think that life is nothing but not being stone dead. You promised me my life but you lied (indignant exclamations). Yes:they told me you were fools (the word gives great offence), and that I was not to listen to your fine words nor trust your charity. (She rushes to the table snatches up the paper and tears it into fragments) Light your fire:do you think I dread it as much as the life of a rat in a hole? My voices were right.
Instead he revels in the complexity…a dialectic that’s weighty even as it crackles with wit.JOAN: (rising in consternation and terrible anger) Perpetual imprisonment! Am I not then to be set free? Give me that writing. “in this 1923 play, written three years after Joan received sainthood, Shaw never goes for the didactic slam-dunk, even when the angels are on his side. “Shaw’s play is about not heavenly triumph but human hypocrisy - how we crush the dreamer under our heel and then memorialize her a point still sharp as Joan’s sword and vivid as the fire that consumed her.” – Vulture Properties Designer – Jessamyn Bateman-Iino
Presented in a new, stripped-back staging directed by Mathew Wright, prepare to see Joan’s incendiary life shine brighter than ever. Fiery and timeless, Shaw’s masterpiece shines a fierce light on the limits of an individual in a society dominated by political and religious forces. Tracing the life of Joan of Arc from the siege of Orleans, through her trial and recantation, and culminating with the tragedy that transformed into a legend, Saint Joan is an electrifying portrait of one of history’s most revered and revolutionary lightning rods. Nobel Prize-winning playwright George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion/My Fair Lady)
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