Peter Viney's Blog

Mrs Warren’s Profession
George Bernard Shaw

Directed by Anthony Banks
Designed by David Woodhead
Lighting design by Lizzie Powell

UK Tour Autumn 2022
Bath Theatre Royal
Friday 11 November, 19.30

CAST:

Caroline Quentin – Mrs Warren
Rose Quentin – Vivie Warren, her daughter
Simon Shepherd – Sir George Crofts
Matthew Cottle – Reverend Samuel Gardener
Stephen Rahman Hughes – Mr Praed
Peter Lossaso- Frank Gardener

Preamble … a visit to Bath

We’ve been to Bath several times a year for decades. We sometimes stay over, when there’s a good play in the Theatre Royal, and another in the Ustinov Studios behind. We thought we’d stay over this time and do Christmas shopping on the Saturday. Last time, earlier this year, we paid £150 for a four star hotel including breakfast. This Friday that same hotel was £295 without breakfast. Everywhere was booked. Never mind, I said, we’ll just stay at the Travel Lodge, we can put up with a noisy main road outside, very basic room, vending machine and no service. What? That came up at £265. All hotels now operate on availability algorithms. We decided our only option was to drive home at 10 p.m. It’s not the distance, but it’s all winding country roads and can take up to two hours. On a November evening, the restaurants nearby had large open air seating areas. They were packed with diners. Anyway, we drove back and fortunately it was a clear dry night. Home at midnight.

The play

George Bernard Shaw wrote the play in 1894, it was immediately banned, then performed in a private member’s club in 1902. The first proper public performance in London had to wait until 1925. After a 1905 performance in New York, the cast were arrested.

It must be one of the few plays with a 32 page Preface by the author, and he categorized in as ‘Plays Unpleasant’ when they were compiled in sets.

Mrs Warren’s Profession was written in 1894 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. Indeed all attractive unpropertied women lose money by being infallibly virtuous or contracting marriages that are not more or less venal.

George Bernard Shaw, Preface.

Note that the programme and Wikipedia date it to 1893. Shaw continues:

I could not have done anythingmore injurious to my prospects at the outset of my career. My play was immediately stigmatized by the Lord Chamberlain, who by Act of Parliament has despotic, and even supermonarchial power over our theatres, as ‘immoral and otherwise improper for the stage. Its performance was prohibited, I myself being branded by implication, to my my great damage as an unscrupulous and blackguardly author. True I have lived this defamation down and am apparently none the worse. True too that the stage under the censorship became so licentious after the war that the ban on a comparatively prudish play like mine became ridiculous and had to be lifted.

George Bernard Shaw

I went through a period of reading Shaw’s plays. An annoying aspect is his belief that he could single-handedly change punctuation, so the Penguin text eliminates contractions in: youd, cant, maynt, dont, theyre, wouldnt, couldnt, didnt. Then he seems happy with punctuating when contractions are not in the final position … so he writes she’s, I’d etc. He is also happy to use possessive apostrophes, as in the play’s title Mrs Warren’s Profession. I’m surprised that modern editions don’t change it, maybe they do … my text is 1965. I’m quite sure his estate has strictures on what may and (may not / mayn’t / maynt) be done.

I’ve recently started sorting our cartons of play programmes ad I’m surprised at how many Shaw I’ve seen (and totally forgotten). The detailed setting descriptions in the play texts are astonishingly controlling. What do directors and designers make of stage instructions such as ‘the sun is shining from a cloudless sky‘ or ‘on the lawn between the house and its drive is a clipped yew tree, with a garden bench in its shade. On the opposite side the garden is shut in by a box hedge.’ So you need to know your yew from your box. The casting director gets very specific instructions: He (Praed) has silky black hair with waves of grey and white in it. His eyebrows are white. His moustache is black.’ I think that indicates that Praed dyed his moustache but not his eyebrows. Well, sorry GBS, here he’s just bearded.

We’ve seen both Caroline Quentin and Matthew Cottle this year, Matthew Cottle only a few weeks ago at Chichester in Woman in Mind, and Caroline Quentin in Jack Absolute Rides Again.

The play is a Bath production, and is on a strong tour after Bath. It sounds like a good play to sell seats … Caroline Quentin is in the lead role, and her real daughter, Rose plays Vivie Warren, her stage daughter. As you can see from the flier and programme illustration, they are obviously mother and daughter (though in the production, neither gets those red dresses). Above all, the plot sounds temptingly salacious.

In brief: Mrs Warren made her fortune first as a prostitute, then as a brothel madam. She had three sisters, one was slave labour virtually in a lead paint factory until she died of lead poisoning. Another was married, living with three kids in one room on a pittance. The third sister turned up at the bar at Waterloo Station where Mrs Warren was a skivvy for 18 hours a day, and the third sister was wearing a fur coat and explained how she got it. So Mrs Warren turned to prostitution. This enabled her to educate her daughter at a high level at Cambridge. Her daughter knew nothing of her mother’s past, nor the source of her fortune. The daughter, Vivie, has no idea who her father was, and the three older males … Mr Praed, Sir George Crofts and the Reverend Gardner, are all candidates for parenthood.

Sir George Crofts doesn’t know or care, and wants to marry Vivie. In a Shaw twist, Crofts promises her that he is 25 years older than her, so she will be a rich widow if she is prepared to tolerate a few years of marriage. As Shaw points out at length in his preface, marriages for money are akin to prostitution, but for the upper classes.

To complicate matters, the reverend’s son, Frank, is infatuated with Vivie and wants to marry her. It will turn out that they may (or may not) be half brother and half sister.

The selling seats worked. When we saw we couldn’t get a hotel in Bath, we thought about cancelling and switching to the tour when it gets to Chichester a couple of weeks later … while it’s the same distance from Poole, almost exactly, it’s a mainly faster motorway drive, and Chichester is a vastly more comfortable theatre with better acoustics and better sight lines. Unfortunately, Bath had got out its pre-publicity well before Chichester had announced its winter programme. So we looked at Chichester matinees and very few seats were left.

The thing is, the ‘temptingly salacious’ is a false trail. It is not in the slightest. In contrast, it’s mildly dull and very ‘worthy.’ A mistake in the programme, I felt, was showing a Shaw timeline. It reveals that the 1880s to 1910 period was a theatrical golden age with Strindberg, Chekov, Ibsen, Wilde, Barrie … and Shaw. While Shaw would have placed himself in this Premier League, and critics may have done so for a few decades, in retrospect he’s not in the same class.

There are four scenes. The first two take place in the garden of a little cottage near Haslemere, with a large tree and the ‘cottage’ which is tiny. I’d assumed it was a summer house until I looked at the play text.In the second scene, the chimney emits smoke. The cloudless sky is static rather than the 2022 fashionable video projection.

After the interval, it’s the Reverend Gardner’s rectory garden. We see a perspective church. A very strange design choice was in having the church gate as if part of the perspective so about 60% size. The result is everyone has to duck down when they go through it. This caused some laughter every time, but these are not funny bits.

Scene four is Vivie’s office as an accountant. According to Shaw it’s in Chancery Lane and ‘the chimneys of Lincoln’s Inn and the western sky beyond are seen through the window.’ The designer ignored that instruction.

The costume design is indeterminate, but I’d say they were thinking circa 1925 when the play got its official debut. I had doubts … the Victorian era for all its little skirts around piano legs and propriety was a high point for prostitution, which is when Shaw wrote it. As ever public puritanism so often conceals private vice. World War One had opened many more employment avenues for poor women. Still, Mrs Warren had been on the game and running houses for at least twenty-five years.

So what did we think? First off, Simon Shepherd’s powerful voice projection filled the hall, so he was much louder than everyone else. Simon Shepherd’s volume was right. Caroline Quentin and Matthew Cottle were not as loud, but clear. The others needed to up the volume a little.

I felt sorry for Peter Losasso as Frank. He did extremely well in coping with lines from the text that I could not have read with a straight face. Costume didn’t help. Did the costume designer have Bertie Wooster in mind? The issue was that Shaw, having seen Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance seemed to think erroneously that he too could write ‘banter.’ Ouch. It’s like Noel Coward’s attempts to write ‘working class,’ an abject failure. Peter Losasso had to say ‘Bravo, gov’nor’ to his dad, and get through lines like ‘What a lark!‘ and to Vivie, ‘Kissums?‘ and more baby talk like ‘Vivvums mustn’t lecture. Her little boy’s incorrigible.’ I see it’s Vivvums in the text. I’d quite thought on the night that it was Diddums. Frank gets by far the lion’s share of awful writing by Shaw, and all credit to him delivering it with conviction.

Caroline Quentin gets the long narratives in Scene 3, describing her past. These are easily the best part of the production. She has to cope with calling people ‘dearie‘ though. She always commands the stage. She has a difficult stage direction after describing Sir George as ‘Silly old …’ . The direction? She swallows an epithet and turns white at the narrowness of her escape from uttering it. Turning white would be quite a trick on stage. Nowadays, I’d just start to say the epithet and stop halfway.

Sir George Crofts (Simon Shepherd) is the baddie … he is after Vivie without a care in the world as to whether it might be incest, and also attacks her physically (major audience ‘Gasp!’ point) so that she has to be saved by Frank with a rifle. Hmm. It’s a slim rifle, more like an airgun or a target sports gun. If you’re going to threaten with a rifle give him something much heftier. It turns out that Crofts is Mrs Warren’s partner and their brothel empire is international and wide reaching … so that they are themselves capitalist exploiters, subjecting girls to the fate that sheer poverty drove Mrs Warren into.

Rose Quentin is an assured and strong Vivie. The female role Shaw was fond of. A cigar and a very firm handshake are part of the image.

Matthew Cottle is the vicar and draws most of the laughs, and draws them with ease and assurance. It’s a cameo really, but superbly done.

Stephen Rahman Hughes is Mr Praed, which is an odd role. The more I look at the text, the odder it gets. He’s more cheerful, and a friend of Mrs Warren but somewhat detached. As with the rest of the cast, he carries it off with aplomb.

There’s nothing wrong with any of the acting. The set’s good and as detailed as Shaw would have wished … but I don’t like the play and I like the dialogue even less than the story. The writing in 2022 sounds stilted and creaky, and it only gets across because the performances are so good. It tends to two-person dialogue, and when we get to the long narration, Shaw might have felt he was concealing his sermons under a storyline … but he wasn’t. Oscar Wilde still works as written. You can’t judge Chekhov or Ibsen because they are continually retranslated and in new versions. Shaw doesn’t survive the passage of time in the same way. Too didactic by half.

The reviewers ratings were added when they arrived … they put press night right at the end of the Bath run to promote the tour. Still, my rule is that if it’s a full price ticket, it’s subject to review. Simply, looking at my previous reviews, I just don’t rate Bernard Shaw as a playwright.

Production ***
Play **

AUDIO ASSISTANCE

Karen uses headset audio assistance. It works beautifully at both Chichester theatres, and reasonably well at Stratford. They all use the same Sennheiser headset, but at Bath the sound is abysmal. She told me in the interval and urged me to try the headset for a couple of minutes as the second half started. It managed to have a large booming echo, while being blurred. Horrible sound. We mentioned this at Chichester once, praising their system, and they said, ‘Ah, we have more microphones than most theatres.’

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID (added later)

four star
Georgina Brown, Daily Mail ****
Libby Purves, Theatre Cat ****

three star
Arifa Akbar, The Guardian ***
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ***
Quentin Letts, Sunday Times ***
Clive Davis, The Times ***
Mike Whitton, Stage Talk Magazine ***
Tim Bano, The Stage ***

LINKS ON THIS BLOG:

PLAYS BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Candida, Theatre Royal Bath, 2013
Man & Superman, National Theatre, 2014
Pygmalion, Nuffield, Southampton 2016

ANTHONY BANKS (Director)
Hogarth’s Progress, by Nick Dear, Rose Theatre, Kingston 2018
(TheArt of Success / The Taste of The Town)

CAROLINE QUENTIN
Jack Absolute Rides Again, Richard Bean Oliver Chris, National Theatre 2022
The Provoked Wife, RSC2019
The Hypocrite by Richard Bean, RSC 2017
Relative Values by Noel Coward, Bath Theatre Royal 2013
Me & My Girl, Chichester, 2018

MATTHEW COTTLE
Woman in Mind, by Alan Ayckbourn, Chichester, 2022
The Deep Blue Sea, by Terence Rattigan, Chichester Minerva 2019
The Chalk Garden by Enid Bagnold, Chichester 2018
Communicating Doors by Alan Ayckbourn, Menier Chocolate Factory, 2015
Neighbourhood Watch by Alan Ayckbourn, Stephen Joseph Company, Bath Theatre Royal, 2012
Quartemaine’s Terms, by Simon Gray, TheatreRoyal, Brighton 2014

SIMON SHEPHERD
Hay Fever, by Noel Coward, Bath Theatre Royal, 2014