"When I wrote that, I had some nerve," chuckled Shaw about his 1893 play, which was banned by the Lord Chamberlain and had to wait over 30 years for a production in this country. Mrs Warren's profession is, of course, the oldest in the world. And while that was surely what so grieved the censor, Victorian hypocrisy and two-faced capitalism were Shaw's main targets in this, his most Ibsenite of dramas.
Of the regularly revived Shaw plays, this is one that has best stood the test of time. It helps that it is uncharacteristically brief, and that for once the old boy doesn't go huffing and puffing off on long tangents. It helps even more that the issues raised - the economic position of women and the ethics of capitalism and investment - are as pertinent now as they were 100 years ago.
The play gets the production it deserves here, although the Freudian dream sequences in Deborah Bruce's otherwise admirable staging seem superfluous, and Lucy Bevan's designs, in which Surrey fields meld into Chancery Lane wallpaper, a mite clunky. But the performances are lovely. Isla Blair's Kitty Warren, who chooses life as a whore over an early death in an East End sweatshop and uses the money to buy her daughter Vivie the education and respectability she could never hope to achieve, displays just the right touch of vulgarity. Ruth Grey as "new woman" Vivie, who at first admires her mother for her ability to survive and then condemns her because she continues to profit from the trade, gets on her high horse beautifully and stays firmly put.
The men are just as interesting. With the exception of the kindly Praed, they are either mean or ridiculous - sometimes both. There are exquisitely judged performances from Paul Nicholson as the blustering Samuel Gardner, Tom Harper as his callow, two-faced, winsome son Frank and Jeremy Clyde as the calculating Crofts. They suggest that 100 years ago, the male of the species was already in crisis.
· Until October 5. Box office: 0117-987 7877.
