SOURCE: Hayes, Richard. “The Stage: The Lark.” Commonweal (23 December 1955): 304-05.

In the following review, Hayes elucidates the differences between the historical accounts of Joan of Arc and the dramatic representations of her in Anouilh's The Lark and George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan.

“Some nights, when I am feeling depressed,” Jean Anouilh has written of Joan of Arc, “I try to be rational and I say: the situation—social, political and military—was ripe for the phenomenon of Joan; a little shepherdess, one of the countless little shepherdesses who had seen the Virgin or heard voices, and who happened to be called Joan, came to fill a gap in the works, and then everything began turning.” It is this image which dominates the play Miss Lillian Hellman has drawn from Anouilh's L'Alouette, and with which Miss Julie Harris has made so palpable a hit: the image, not of “the...