George Bernard Shaw’s provocative play Mrs Warren’s Profession examines the moral hypocrisy of the moneyed classes. It opens with a brilliant young graduate, Vivie Warren, boasting about her dazzling achievements as a mathematician at Newnham College, Cambridge. She explains her future plans to a pair of mild-mannered chaps who clearly adore her. Like most of Shaw’s characters, Vivie is hard-nosed, emotionally cold, incapable of speaking concisely and boundlessly self-confident. Quite irritating, in other words. She plans to start a firm with another hyper-brainy female and to make a killing in the London insurance market. This occurs in 1902. Was it normal for two unmarried Edwardian women to enter the world of high finance straight out of university? Hard to say. But for Shaw it seems feasible, so we accept it.
However, Vivie’s life is about to be thrown into disarray. Enter Mrs Warren, her redoubtable mother, played by Imelda Staunton. Kitty Warren speaks and thinks exactly like her daughter but she affects a more luxurious personal style. Her ash-blonde hair is piled high on her head and she’s magnificently robed in a costly ball gown accented with necklaces and other pieces of finery. She looks like the tsarina being led to her execution by the Bolsheviks. But her accent carries inflections of a rough past.
We learn that Kitty rose from the gutter to become a wealthy businesswoman and the details of her past are slowly revealed during Act One. She began as a barmaid at Waterloo Station where she earned four shillings (£20 today) a week. Then she was spotted by a female relative who worked as a courtesan and recruited Kitty to the business. Kitty prospered and opened a chain of private hotels in Ostend, Vienna, and other cities across Europe. Meanwhile her daughter was privately educated in England but she knew nothing of her mother’s career. When Vivie learns the truth she reacts with forgiveness. Good for her. Then another bombshell lands. Kitty’s international business is still in operation and Vivie receives a monthly dividend from the profits. Horrified, she demands a reckoning.
The production, directed by Dominic Cooke, is dominated by Shaw’s verbose and stupefyingly clever prose. The script is not overburdened with jokes. ‘Women have to pretend to feel a good deal that they don’t feel,’ says Kitty, which raises a modest laugh. Staunton turns in a decent performance during the first half. In Act Two she’s let down by Shaw’s habit of creating characters from opinions and attitudes rather than emotions and instincts. Kitty makes a monumental speech asserting her maternal ‘rights’ to Vivie’s love but she sounds like an expert witness at a custody hearing. The story ends abruptly without a proper resolution. The big selling-point of the show is the casting of Staunton opposite her biological daughter, Bessie Carter, as Vivie. Perhaps the plan was to add layers of emotional depth to the story but the experiment doesn’t work because the Vivie-Kitty relationship is based on distance and alienation, not on love and propinquity.
Chloe Lamford’s elegant designs would probably have impressed Shaw. The first act is set in a luxuriant circular garden, like a putting green, arranged with elegant seats and gorgeous flower beds bursting into bloom. Everything is sensuous, vibrant and life-affirming. Act Two overturns this colour palette and takes us into Vivie’s cheerless office in Chancery Lane. She perches at a plain desk in a circular space without any drapery or carpets. The bleak walls are painted a uniform flat grey – the colour of rainless winter skies. The contrast between goodness and greed couldn’t be starker.
Outpatient is a monologue with a weirdly contrived premise. Olive is a freelance journalist who receives a commission to interview terminally ill patients. On a routine visit to the GP she learns that her liver has an abnormality that may be fatal. Then again, it may not.
Olive turns to Google for advice, despite her doctor’s warnings to the contrary, and she learns that her death is almost certainly imminent. Instead of making her feel depressed, she finds the news electrifying and she starts to live her life at 100 miles an hour. She goes on a shoplifting spree and ‘bodyslams’ her way through the ticket barriers on the Tube. At home she breaks the bad news to her girlfriend and they agree to cancel their wedding. Olive befriends a terminally ill patient who needs a lover to sweeten her final days. Olive obliges. This gloomy material is staged with brilliant wit and humour by Harriet Madeley. She has a film star’s knack of turning a little detail into a massively successful joke.
The show feels like a 60-minute pitch for a movie that could become a cult hit. As for the ending, it’s as contrived as the opening. Somehow Madeley gets away with it.
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