Saint Joan (2009 Audiobook)

Siobhan McKenna stars as the Maid of Orleans in Albert Marre's 1956 Broadway revival of the 1923 George Bernard Shaw play which led to his 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature. Also featured in the production which started at the Phoenix Theatre but transferred to the Coronet on Broadway were Earle Hyman as Dunois, Ian Keith as Couchan, Earl Montgomery as de Stogumber, Dick Moore as Brother Martin, Kent Smith as the Earl of Warwick, Paul Sparer as the Executioner, Peter Falk as an English Soldier and Michael Wagner as the Dauphin. John Cullum was in the ensemble!

Notes

Frequently referred to as "a tragedy without villains," GBS called it a chronicle play in six scenes and an Epilogue, SAINT JOAN was one of several plays which premiered in New York before London (at the Theatre Guild's Garrick Theatre, 28 December 1923), but it might not have happened but for the gentle urging of Shaw's wife, Charlotte, who saw a natural subject for her husband's pen with the canonization of Joan of Lorraine in the early 1920's and left books and magazines on "the maid" out around their home until her husband suddenly had the brilliant thought that there might be a play in the story of Joan of Arc! Filmed by Otto Preminger (from Graham Green's reworking of Shaw's own screen treatment - dividing the Epilogue in two to provide a Prologue framing device), most later versions of the story have followed Shaw's basic structure of this frame to put Joan's story in a stronger context. This recording (originally done by RCA Victor as LOC 6133) boasts one of the strongest recorded casts of many out there.