#I do in general consider myself a shaw enjoyer but the range of that enjoyment is so drastic like unfortunately it’s not all candida and

[brechtian]

hi! i just finished st joan by shaw, and as someone who’s a fan of both shaw and brecht (iirc), i was wondering if you had any thoughts on shaw’s st joan and brecht’s st joan of the stockyards as contemporaneous pieces?

Hello friend!!! As you know, I found this ask so exciting I went and read both of these plays (it took me a little while; I’ll blame having to uproot my life suddenly and move to Florida haha).

As to their status as contemporaneous pieces, I do find it interesting that both Shaw and Brecht clearly had strong feelings about the then-recent canonization of Joan of Arc in 1920. To give Shaw an amount of credit, premiering a play in 1923 which criticizes the hypocrisy of the Catholic church’s canonization of Joan while maintaining similar attitudes and hierarchical systems of power which caused her execution to begin with was probably a bit more groundbreaking than it reads now. With that said, I’m not sure I’d consider Shaw’s play… particularly good. Which is a shame; one of my favorite things about Shaw is probably his female characters, but Joan, as the only one in the whole play, is portrayed as kind of… banal. Like, she’s perfect, she’s God’s favored, etc. but she doesn’t seem to have much of an issue with social or clerical systems of power at large except for insofar as they obstruct her goals to defeat England. Glancing through the Wikipedia page for the play, I really enjoyed T.S. Eliot’s criticism “instead of the saint or the strumpet of the legends to which he objects, he has turned her into a great middle-class reformer” (“A Commentary,” 1924). This isn’t necessarily Surprising, since Shaw’s political/social commentary is incredibly hit or miss, but I found the repetition and one-dimensionality of Joan and her struggles sort of a drag by the time I reached the second half of the play. ALSO… I found the epilogue extremely gauche and bizarre, it really did not fit with the piece and was kind of lip-curlingly tacky lmao.

BRECHT <3 I know you’re shocked to hear this but tumblr user brechtian really really really enjoyed Brecht’s Saint Joan. I mean, it’s really Brecht doing what he does best, which is taking a seed of a preexisting story and transforming it into brilliant complex class commentary. I was hoping going into it that there’d be criticism of the role the church plays in maintaining capitalism and BOY was I not disappointed. Literally the relationship between ideological and coercive state apparatuses, the critique of neoliberal nonviolence, skepticism of the reformed bourgeois + the difficulty of genuinely relinquishing that status within a system that necessitates power inequality SHE HAS IT ALL! Brecht also having the guts to actually have Joan lose her religious faith by the end (quite literally disco elysium voice communism replaces a faith in the divine with a faith in humanity’s future…) makes the empty propping up of her name and legacy as a symbol for the continuation of the status quo at the end sooo much more effective than Shaw’s cheesy fucking epilogue. In short, everything I’d want from a communist chicago stockyard loose adaptation of Joan d’Arc’s life because it has teeth it has claws it has BITE! I fear comparing the two is really coughing baby wealthy democratic socialist vs communist hydrogen bomb