Word: joans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...with hearing everyone complain about Britain's ailing economy, five pert and miniskirted typists at a factory in Surrey decided to do something about it. To help boost productivity and hold costs down, the girls-Valerie White, 21, Joan Southwell, 20, Christine French, 17, Carol Ann Fry, 16, and Brenda Mumford, 15-volunteered to work 30 minutes extra a day without any additional pay. In most countries such a gesture would have attracted scant attention. In Britain, whose economic difficulties stem as much as anything from an "I'm all right, Jack" attitude among its workers, the girls...
...Shaw's plays have taken his death badly. The scenes creak at the joints. The wit sputters more often than it fizzes. The characters seem alive from the neck up only. St. Joan has not been spared. In a conscientious but lethargic revival at Manhattan's Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, the play drones on like a college seminar labeled "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Nationalism, 1412-1431." In the title role, Diana Sands is earth-bound but never God-intoxicated, more of a common scold than an uncommon saint...
...theatrical problem of St. Joan is an immense credibility gap. At the heart of the play is a simple country maid who hears what she believes to be divine voices. Are they heavenly or hallucinatory? She secures access to France's Dauphin (Edward Zang) and convinces him of her inspired mission to raise his nation from the mire of defeat and British occupation. She dons a soldier's garb, leads the army to lift the siege at Orléans, and then crowns the Dauphin King in Rheims Cathedral...
...Maid clearly has charisma, but how does Shaw indicate it? He has the other characters say several times: "There's something about the girl." All the rest is left to the actress who plays Joan. She must make the audience believe in the other characters' phenomenal belief in her. This, Diana Sands fails to do. She stresses Joan the outward realist and scants Joan the inner mystic. Her voice can be heard, and a trifle too stridently, but her "voices" are mute...
James Coburn is a New York head-shrinker who has everything-a luxurious office where he practices on a Chinese gong between couchings, a patient (Godfrey Cambridge) who is a killer for the Central Emergency Agency, a delicious young bedmate (Joan Delaney), and the biggest smile in the American Psychoanalytic Association. He also has a psychiatrist of his own, who tells him one day that Coburn has mysteriously been picked to unburden the mind of no less a personage than the President of the United States. Presumably, as Kings once had confessors, Presidents now need analysts...