The Theater: Old Play in Manhattan, Sep. 24, 1956

Saint Joan (by Bernard Shaw*) boasts a title role that is one of the great acting challenges of the modern theater. None of the actresses who have played Shaw's Joan on Broadway—Winifred Lenihan, Katharine Cornell, Uta Hagen—has left a lasting stamp upon the role. At the off-Broadway Phoenix Theater last week, Irish Actress Siobhan (pronounced Shiv-awn) McKenna brought something a good deal more memorable to it. Her thick-brogued, almost blatantly peasantlike Joan was all drive and no dreaminess. She had an unshakable faith in her voices and her mission because it could never...