Name: 'Mrs Warren’s Profession' Review
Item: Richmond Theatre
Author: Simon Collins

'Mrs Warren’s Profession' Review

Simon Collins reviews Mrs Warren’s Profession by Bernard Shaw

Venue: Richmond Theatre. Get directions.

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Our verdict:

★★★★

PAMELA RAITH

In the 21st Century, even classic Shaw plays such as Mrs Warren, are increasingly rare in commercial theatre.

More usually you meet Goldilocks, endure an evening with Jimmy Carr, or peel back the layers of the play of the film of the book, as with The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Such foolish things.

But a hundred years ago society was more serious.

Shaw strode the public stage as a global colossus, pressing his view that Theatre is the modern equivalent of the Medieval Church, “a temple to the Ascent of Man.”

With wit and charm, his dialogue oscillates between rousing speeches on the topics of the day and Wildean repartee. These latter moments provide the evening’s laughter.

But the topics of current affairs have lost their relevance. By now Shaw’s reputation has evaporated leaving only clever quips glinting in the footnotes of memoirs.

The focus here is an apparent defence of prostitution. Shocking enough in those times to have the theatre stormed by police and the cast arrested. That really happened. Today sexual transgression is just another half-hour TV infotainment.

One of the ways this production enlivens an old Victorian play is by giving the two leading roles to a real mother and daughter, Caroline and Rose Quentin, playing the fictional Mrs Kitty Warren, bawd of a dozen brothels spread across Europe, and her daughter Vivie, a Victorian proto-feminist.

Oddly, they look and sound more similar than most mothers and daughters.

This makes for a good photograph on the playbill, and probably sells seats, but since both skilled actresses are dutiful in their roles there seems no special rapport between the characters that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. The Warrens are not similar to the real-life Quentins.

In any case, we soon forget the fame of an actor when immersed in character and story.

Moreover, the expressionist set design transports the audience away from Shaw’s real-world concerns to a dreamlike Wildean story world.

PAMELA RAITH

The story is quite good: A recent Cambridge graduate who has led a materially privileged life learns it was all paid for by prostitution – but her mother isn’t ashamed.

Mrs Warren justifies herself as a madam by reasoning that the “respectable” employment of her two sisters was poorly paid, the hours unending, and (without health and safety laws) dangerous and diseased.

One sister died of lead poisoning whilst the other, neat and tidy, barely existed in one small room in Deptford with a labouring husband and three rowdy children.

Mrs Warren exploits her young employees, already on their backs, like every other boss. Shaw is exposing the sugar-coating of capitalism, saying that prostitution is no different from most jobs.

Unfortunately, his critique is tangled with enthusiasm for Vivie Warren as an exemplar of the New Woman, the feminist ideal of the 1890s.

And this means that after discovering her boyfriend is her own brother! she feels obliged to break all her former conventional social bonds.

Shaw (and this production) shows her fate at the end as ambiguous: she is happily independent but a solitary, capitalist drone like any other office worker, having no family, no companion in life, no prospect of children, and no one dear to come when she is old.