Once written it took some eight years for George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs Warren’s Profession to have its première thanks to the then puritanical censorship laws that arbitrated what was fit to be seen on the licenced stage.
Since that first showing in 1902—“permitted” by dint of being produced in a private theatre club and not a public theatre—the play has lost its shock factor, but none of its relevance.
The play’s heroine on the surface is Vivie Warren, a New Woman of the time, exceptionally well-educated, unapologetically opinionated and fearsomely independent. Or perhaps really it is her mother, Mrs Kitty Warren, who, against the odds, pulled herself out of poverty.
That she did so through prostitution to become a successful businesswoman running a chain of brothels across Europe, at least by her own account, as a benevolent motherly boss to the girls for whom she facilitated an income is a strangely well-kept secret.
The play is a look at the societal hypocrisies of the Victorian era and at the clash between generations, cyclically endured by parents as their children headbutt inherited boundaries as they themselves had done.
But in the main, it is an examination of how, as a New Woman—being a woman who challenges the traditional female roles largely around agency, marriage and motherhood—Vivie can square the circle of her mother’s chosen profession.
Inevitably, the relationship between Vivie and her mother is a strange and strained one from the outset, and Bethany Blake’s Vivie is lively, free-thinking and self-reliant.
By contrast, Joe Sargent’s effervescently jolly Frank Gardner, a suitor to Vivie’s assumed wealth, is full of arrogant confidence.
At second preview, it is these two who give energy to the production, though this could even out as the production, directed with clarity by Jonas Cemm (who also plays businessman and suitor Sir George Crofts), beds in during its run, which includes a performance on Shaw’s birthday at his Hertfordshire home before returning to London (at the Tabard Theatre).
After more than a century and a quarter, it is a tragedy that Shaw’s play remains so germane. Today, it is not just the selective blindness of the likes of Mrs Warren’s friend Praed, played here with avuncular charm by Karl Moffat, that needs undoing but the misogyny of the manosphere and societies’ move to the right that is reversing many hard-won fights.