Theatre

Warmongering zealots professing hotlines to God? Plus ça change, as the National’s revival of Shaw’s Joan of Arc play invites one depressingly to reflect. Marianne Elliott’s is a belting production – literally, during the battle of Orleans, when everyone starts bashing steel panels with steel bars and whacking chairs off the floor. But if the stagecraft is au courant, I’m not sure I can say the same about Saint Joan’s status as a parable of free-thinking versus institutional authority. ‘Joan’s religious fanaticism,’ wrote Shaw’s biographer Michael Holroyd at the weekend, ‘becomes the protest of a plain-spoken individual conscience.’ But to this viewer, it pretty much remains religious fanaticism.

‘I am God’s child,’ she raves, ‘and you are not fit that I should live among you.’ Which makes Joan as hard to like as the equally self-righteous churchmen and aristocrats whose power she threatens. Shakespeare would have given Joan a soliloquy, but here there’s no self-doubt, nothing to dilute her bellicosity and ‘I hear voices’ egomania. Anne-Marie Duff does a terrific job humanising her: she’s fiery-eyed and uncynical, and even a heart frozen by endless Shavian cogitation would melt at her naïve frustration with the prosecutors’ moral gymnastics. But I can credit Joan only so far as a symbol of independence from authority – not least because she takes her mandate for that independence from the greatest (albeit non-existent) authority of them all.

The show’s pleasures, then, I found elsewhere: in its historical richness, in the silken realpolitik of Angus Wright’s Earl of Warwick, and in Joan’s nemesis the Bishop of Beauvais (Paterson Joseph), struggling to square his conscience with ecclesiastical necessity. It all gets improbably grandstanding as Joan faces the Holy Inquisition, then is brought back for a queasily hagiographic epilogue. But elsewhere, the production lays siege to one’s reservations, and conquers them with conviction and style. Presumably, God is on its side.