Saint Joan, Olivier Theatre, NT, London

Joan of Arc is remarkably flexible as a symbol. She is both a Roman Catholic saint and a martyr for defiant, anti-clerical individualism. She's been a mascot for women's emancipation and an emblem of child-like female innocence. She has been co-opted by right-wingers as the poster girl for military strength and national unity, and by the left as the doyenne of dissidence. For George Bernard Shaw in his 1923 play, she is the spirit of Protestantism – the individual conscience against the status quo, the "evolutionary appetite" against the vested interests of feudalism and the church. In a sense, she's Shaw in medieval armour.

But watching Marianne Elliott's tremendously stirring and astute revival, presented in the Olivier as part of the Travelex £10 season, you're impressed by how fairly the author puts the case against Joan and examines the dangers she poses.

There's a hint of topicality in the words of the Bishop of Beauvais when he asks "what will it be when every girl thinks herself a Joan and every man a Mahomet?" A young woman who thinks she is in a personal dialogue with God, with these "voices" telling her to wage war against the occupying English army: is this Joan the Jihadist?

Shaw's view of his heroine was, of course, predominantly positive. Brilliantly reflecting his notion that the world is never ready for its saints and that Joan would be destroyed again if she were to return today, Elliott's largely modern-dress production stages the play as though it were part of an endlessly recurring ritual. The stake that is Joan's destination is already there at the start, represented by a stack of chairs. This is dreamily dismantled by the company who double as the spectators of a story that unfolds on a raked, revolving platform against the backdrop of a blasted forest.

At the end, after the shortened and re-jigged epilogue, the production intimates that the drama is about to happen all over again.

In this staging, there is, to adapt Churchill, war-war as well as jaw-jaw. Elliott lets us see Joan in action in military sequences where, say, the raising of the siege of Orleans is depicted as a chair-bashing stylised modern dance to percussion hammered by the company on sheets of corrugated iron. Purists may complain but these injections of spectacle and physical urgency have the effect of returning you, refreshed and ready for more, to the intellectual debate which is conducted here with great wit and vigour. In a cast that includes Oliver Ford Davies as the surprisingly considerate Inquisitor, Angus Wright excels in a delectably comic portrayal of the silken, suave fixer, Warwick.

The splendid Anne-Marie Duff is everything you could want from Joan. A slight, Irish-accented female figure in a world of overbearing men, she radiates the charisma and galvanising spiritual conviction of the heroine when she's on the rise and a terrible sense of vulnerability and howling loneliness when she thinks that even the voices have forsaken her in the trial scene.

To 4 September in rep. The Independent reader offer: free programme with every £10 ticket (call 020-7452 3000 and quote "Independent offer")