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Claire Armistead hails Imogen Stubbs as the revolutionary romantic of Shaw's St Joan
The ground bristles with an army of breastplates beneath marbled walls etched with heresies. Imogen Stubbs's warrior saint is silhouetted against a crucifix of light. The eerie composure of this stunning opening image is shattered by the hurtling body of a steward clouted by his squire. Graphically, the petty mistrusts of a nation at war are splattered across the stage.
Gale Edwards's operatic production, a transfer from Theatr Clwyd, never misses an opportunity for the eye-catching image - whether it is the French army's sagging pennant filling with wind or a procession of churchmen winding behind the pillars of Peter J Davison's monumental set.
The preoccupation with imagery isn't simply a bad case of designeritis. Its point is to set the humanity of Shaw's clever play constantly in its political and institutional context, which is what Shaw himself does, only more ponderously. It reminds you why Stubbs's Joan seems so pert and small - she's one little country girl trapped between two warring nations, who simply appears to have the ability to make miracles happen.
To know what Shaw means by miracles, you have to listen in to his Archbishop, trapped between the weary scepticism of the professional churchman and a desire to surrender to peasant-like belief.
Apart from providing an impeccable showcase for his theories of dramatic debate, the story of Joan's martyrdom gave Shaw a chance to air an Irishman's mischievous scorn of English church and state.
The play is wordy and pompous, sure, but it's also breathtakingly clever in its analysis of the phenomenon of sainthood. Stubbs plays Joan as a Geordie sparrow, with a piping excitement and a scrubbed girlishness that radiate a need to be believed. You can see why men would follow by her - she's the original revolutionary romantic, a Girls' Own heroine who bounds around irresistibly in her buckskins, oblivious of the effect she is having .
It's not the definitive way to play the warrior saint, but within the statuesque idiom of the production it works. You can trace the psychology of her betrayal back through the queasy fascination of Jasper Brittan's weedy Dauphin, the prostration of Philip Quast's dignified Dunois and the avuncular pretence of Peter Jeffrey's terrifyingly inscrutable Inquisitor. Every martyr, after all, is a despot's mistake.
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