![]() ![]() That propelled him to pursue this project. Shaw was already interested in the Joan story, studying the substantial transcripts of her trial, but in 1920, Pope Benedict XV canonized her as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, tacitly accepting the French people’s adoration for her as a national savior and in effect recanting its almost 500-year-old excommunication and execution of the young peasant girl-become-soldier. (In 1918, women over the age of 30 who met minimum property qualifications became entitled to vote in the United Kingdom equal voting rights for women over the age of 21 came only in 1928.) True to his socialist ideas, Shaw also used the Joan story to lay down intuitively persuasive arguments for feminism and anti-colonialism, salient themes that were in the air as Shaw wrote. The historical drama is receiving a thrilling and radically re-imagined production by New York’s Bedlam theatre company, now at The Broad Stage in this city.īut already Shaw could see that Jeanne d’Arc-Joan of Arc, known as the Maid of Orléans-was centuries ahead of her time in using her radical belief in God to challenge the temporal authority of feudal kings and lords, as well as the power of the Roman Catholic Church which underpinned the feudal system. ![]() SANTA MONICA, Calif.-The term “liberation theology” had not yet been invented in 1923 when Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, a member of the socialist Fabian Society in England, where he lived, first staged his play Saint Joan. ![]()
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