Robert Tanitch reviews Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession at The Garrick Theatre, London.

There was a time when the plays of George Bernard Shaw were regularly revived in the West End with all-star casts. They are rarely revived today. So, it’s good to be able to see Imelda Staunton in Mrs. Warren’s Profession.

Shaw said that he wrote the play to “draw attention to the truth that prostitution is caused not by female depravity and male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying, undervaluing and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together.”

When the play was first produced in New York in 1905 the whole cast and crew were arrested. London had to wait until 1925 before the Lord Chamberlain would license it; though it was the suggestion of incest rather than prostitution which had kept it off the stage for so long.

Mrs Warren is the managing director of four classy and highly profitable brothels in Brussels, Ostende, Vienna and Budapest. She delivers a long speech, which gives a vivid account of her early life. Faced with the choice being a scullery maid, a waitress, a barmaid or working in a toxic lead white factory and earning starvation wages, she chose the world’s oldest profession.

Her daughter Vivie, an independent and strong-willed woman, who knows nothing of her mother’s profession, is shocked to discover that her Cambridge education has been paid for from the income of the brothels; and she is even more shocked when her mother freely admits she enjoys her job and would be a fool to give up the money.

The dramatic confrontations between mother and daughter are excellently acted by two actors who are actually mother and daughter in real life; but the irony is you would never believe that Imelda Staunton, who is five foot tall, and Bessie Carter, who is ten feet taller, are mother and daughter in real life, if you didn’t know they were.

Reuben Joseph is the opportunistic young man who wants to marry Vivie but only for her money. All he has to offer is charm and Joseph has bags of charm. Robert Glenister is the rogue co-owner and business manager of the brothels, who wants to marry Vivie. He, too, pungently delivers another characteristically long Shavian argument which ends with the quip: “If you’re going to pick and choose your acquaintances on moral principles, you’d better clear out of this country, unless you want to cut yourself out of all decent society.”

Dominic Cooke’s major innovation is to act the play without an interval which is not a good idea. Much better is his inclusion of a chorus of silent prostitutes in white Victorian underwear who haunt the cast and who are also used as stage-mangers to shift furniture and garden shrubbery. They rightly take a curtain-call; but surprisingly get no credit in the programme. They bring something new and fresh to the play as does designer Chloe Lamford with her deliberately non-traditional settings.

It would be nice if Shaw’s plays were revived more often.

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