Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2014 - 11

When the news of Joan's canonization is revealed by a visitor from the future, all assembled kneel before her. (In fact, the
Church only canonized Joan in 1920, four years before Shaw
wrote the play, which proves that art is speedier than theology.)
Joan toys with what she can do now that she is a saint and asks
if they would all like her to use her power to bring herself back
to life. One by one they demur and leave the room except for
the soldier who says that all those kings, captains, bishops, and
lawyers will leave you to bleed to death in a ditch, and next thing
you know they are in hell with you.
Shaw, as always, gives a detailed description of what the
set should be. The king's bed is raised two steps up and to the
side so that it doesn't block the tall window center. All the dead
people appear from various places, but Shaw writes that with a
blackout and flashes of light, Joan enters through the window.
The living come and go by the door. The play is still produced
and almost always in period. Joan is described as homely but is
sometimes played by actresses who are anything but, like Jean
Seberg in Otto Preminger's 1957 film.
Shaw's Man and Superman has a long sequence that
takes place in hell and which has sometimes been performed
separately as Don Juan in Hell. When the whole play is done,

that scene is most often drastically cut, otherwise the whole play
would take way over four hours. Any number of ways of doing
the hell scene have been done, from being set in Don Juan's
real period of the early fifteen hundreds, set in the early nineteen hundreds when the rest of the play is set, costumed with
suggestions of the earlier date, or as a reading with actors in
evening dress, sitting behind music stands. The most famous of
the readings was done in the 1950s with Charles Boyer, Charles
Laughton, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, and Agnes Moorehead. Recordings of this production can still be found on the internet.
There are four characters in the scene, a dream, with each
character corresponding to (and played by the same actor) to
characters from other parts of the play: John Tanner becomes
Don Juan, Ann Whitefield becomes Doña Ana, Roebuck Ramsden becomes the Statue who is Ana's father, and Mendoza is the
devil. The scene is all talk and very little movement except for
comings and goings, the reason it can be done as a reading.
Here again Shaw paints a hell that is completely contrary
to common belief. All the pleasures of life are there without
bothersome bodily functions. It is so pleasant that there is a
constant flow to hell of people who are bored in heaven. And
since it is possible to go back and forth in either direction, the

Kelly Ehlert, Abigail Marks, Jessie Losch, and Jules Willcox in Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl at A Noise Within Theatre, 2013. Set design by Jeanine A. Ringer, lighting design by Meghan
Gray, projection design by Brian Gale, costume design by Angela Balogh Calin. Photo by Craig Schwartz.

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Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2014

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