MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION - ARTS THEATRE

‘There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.’

This typically Shavian piece of wit and wisdom sums up Shaw’s extraordinarily prescient drama brought to vivid life at the Arts Theatre. The headline story is that the eponymous Mrs Warren is played by Caroline Quentine and her stage daughter Vivie portrayed by her real-life offspring Rose. Certainly there was a special familial frisson here but it was a secondary pleasure next to the sheer power of GB’s text which combines great wit (many laugh out loud moments) and universal social criticism.

The ‘secret’ behind Mrs Warren’s professional career (spoiler alert) is that she has made a mint by running a series of high-class whorehouses on the Continent. Vivie, her feisty daughter, the former ‘Third Wrangler’ at Cambridge and very modern woman (the play was minted new in 1891) is made to face the truth of her ma’s funding stream and by implication her own progress in the world. Shaw ramps up the issues and arguments: mothers and daughters, society’s countless hypocracies

‘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’.

It’s a heady mix that propels forward toward a visceral showdown between mother and daughter that is raw and packs a powerful punch 130 years after it was written. Mrs Warren can return the punches:

‘Do you think I was brought up like you able to pick and choose my own way of life? […] Do you think I did what I did because I liked it, or thought it right, or wouldn't rather have gone to college and been a lady if I'd had the chance?’

The production included some startling sets including a first scene set in a kind of fairy tale garden complete with a cottage façade that seemed to come straight out of Hansel and Gretal. In the second scene in a Surrey village, the church façade seemed to have a hyper-real quality. Caroline Quentin played the brash, up-from-the-gutter main character with considerable force yet concealing a brittle interior. Rose Quentin as Vivie, is the de facto central character in the play. This was a no nonsense, no frills reading of a strong young woman determined to follow her own path – to be an independent, hard-working, morally upright person. And one with a crushing handshake.

The two leads were ably supported by the remaining cast of four. Matthew Cottle pitch perfect as the bumbling priest with a dodgy past. Peter Losasso was the silly young man-boy Frank, a hopeful suitor for Vivie but certainly not the grown up in the room. Simon Shepherd was spot on as Sir George Crofts, the rich man-about-town with murk and malice beneath the Saville Row veneer. I liked Stephen Rahman-Hughes as the relentlessly jolly but hopeless romantic Praed who believes that art is the ultimate panacea for an educated gal (a view given short shrift by Shaw).

If I had one criticism of what was a solid production, it was the setting of the play in the 1920s rather than the later Victorian period. This meant that the revelations about Mrs W’s salacious profession and Vivie’s determination to be her own woman in a world of false high morals didn’t quite ring true. Vivie would be more ground-breaking in a bustle rather than flapper-era slacks. But this didn’t take away from what was a gripping, entertaining and energetic revival of this fine play. It was ground-breaking in the 1890s (though long banned from public performance) and still has the power to make you laugh and bring you up short with some uncomfortable truths about our own 21st century world: and that’s no secret.