Though written in 1893, Mrs Warren’s Profession fell foul of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship and (though getting a private club staging in 1902) had to wait until 1925 for its public performance. Why? The reason lies in its title (though never explicitly named it is ‘the oldest’ one—prostitution) and perhaps also in its presentation of capitalism.
When Shaw wrote this, he obviously anticipated a realistic production that would follow the detailed descriptions of his script. He sets it at first in a country cottage garden, and director Dominic Cooke and designer Chloe Lamford set the stage with a lawn and banks of very real looking flowers, but it is set on a revolve, backed by blackness with a blue-lit disc representing the sky above and a bevy of young women in petticoats wandering through it. It is an intriguing mixture of styles with theatricality framing naturalistic performance, and dialogue exchanges easily slide into speeches.
Cooke has shortened a long play to well below two hours, played without interval, and his production proceeds at a smart pace with consistent performances from the whole cast. It centres on the relationship between now-wealthy Mrs Kitty Warren, who runs a chain of brothels across Europe, and her daughter Vivie, who has grown up not knowing who her father is or much about her mother. Vivie has recently completed a degree-level course at Cambridge and plans a career as a lawyer.
Mrs Warren and Vivie are played by real-life mother and daughter Imelda Staunton and Bessie Carter, the contrast between their characters emphasised by their physical difference, Vivie towering above her mother. But size has never stopped Staunton from being a powerhouse on stage. Her Mrs Warren is smartly turned out, used to getting her own way. She has moved up in the world, though a lower class vowel may occasionally cut through, but she vividly pictures her past as she explains life to Vivie. In the last of their several confrontations over just a few moments, she can movingly take us from heartbreak through to anger and exasperation. A woman who can be full of spirit and at ease with men now seems defeated.
Carter makes Vivie controlled and collected, though there is a hint of flirtation with romantic opportunist Frank Gardner, but she shuts out what she feels disgusting. When, in the final scene, her desk is isolated in an otherwise empty room encircled by a featureless wall, it seems that she has shut out much more too; what kind of future has she chosen?
There is strong support from Robert Glenister as Kitty’s business associate Sir George Crofts, free of all qualms about exploiting a workforce that earns little but makes him rich. There’s a characteristic moment when, impatient with a fiddly garden chair, he throws it to the ground. Sid Sagar plays Mr Praed, another of Kitty’s friends, whom she may see as a man for Vivie, and Reuben Joseph plays Frank, drawn to Vivie by pecuniary as well as personal attraction, while Kevin Doyle as his clergyman father contributes a lightening of comedy: could he really have been part of Kitty’s past?
Then there are those girls in their underwear. They make convenient scene shifters, carting flowers round and carrying in furniture, but what is their semiotic function? Do they represent all those women sex workers who have made Mrs Warren rich and whose labours Vivie has also lived off?