The Visions of Simone Machard
- The Visions of Simone Machard
"The Visions of Simone Machard" is a play by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht written in 1942. This is the second St. Joan play by Bertolt Brecht, after Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1932). This play was written jointly with Leon Feuchtwanger and was completed in their exile in Los Angeles. Set in France in 1940, it portrays Joan of Arc as the patron saint of the resistance movement against the Germans.
In the play, an adolescent girl named Simone works at a gas station in central France. Her older brother is a soldier in the army, and the Nazi forces are approaching. While engrossed with a book about Saint Joan, she slips into a series of dreams in which the real persons in her life take on other identities. Her brother appears as an angel, her boss as the coward Connetand, and herself as Saint Joan who helps starving refugees and defies her employer. In real life she sets fire to a secret supply of gasoline before the Germans can get to it. In her dream she is captured and sentenced to death, but in real life she is not yet considered a saboteur. The Germans hand her over to the French as a mere arsonist, and she is led away by nuns to a mental institution.
Bibliography
* Calabro, Tony, "Bertolt Brecht and the Art of Dissemblance", Longwood Academic, 1990
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