Written in 1893, George Bernard Shaw’s morality play “Mrs Warren’s Profession” was so scandalous at the time, it was banned by the Lord Chamberlain and not performed publicly in London until 1925.
The writer’s “sin”, said Susannah Clapp in The Observer, was to make his protagonist a former prostitute and “brothel-keeper who unrepentantly profits from her trade” – and fails “either to kill herself or to melt into sentimental gold-heartedness” when exposed. Like so much of Shaw’s work, “Mrs Warren’s Profession” is highly verbose, but for this production, director Dominic Cooke has hacked away at the “repetitions, Shavian curlicues” and so on, to liberate “the drama’s heart”.
It’s a “sensuous, smart staging” of a “problem play”, agreed Alice Saville in The Independent – featuring a “magnificent” performance from Imelda Staunton in the title role.
Much of the drama turns on Kitty Warren’s relationship with her daughter Vivie – a recent Cambridge graduate who has only just learnt how her mother funded her comfortable life, said Sarah Crompton on What’s on Stage. She is played by Bessie Carter – Staunton’s own daughter – and the “result is an extraordinary tour de force that brings the play to vivid and compelling life”. In a “brilliant” stroke, the director deploys a chorus of women, clad in 1920s underwear, who observe the action and gradually demolish the simple set – in a symbolic stripping away of illusions that is surprisingly effective.
I’m afraid I found it all a bit muted, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian – “like a Wilde play without the jokes”. The mother-daughter duologues are full of life, but the “scenes around them feel filled with extraneous, thinly drawn characters and plot”.
As for the scantily clad chorus, it struck me as “reductively decorative”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph – and the production overall seemed somewhat “anodyne”. “Shaw, the old radical, would be glad to see how his work has endured – but wouldn’t he also want it showing a bit more fire in its belly?”
Mother-daughter duo bring new life to George Bernard Shaw’s morality play