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Who knows how it worked back then, but George Bernard Shaw was either paid by the word or really bored in the late 1800s because his plays are long. Sometimes someone turns them into a musical - Pygmalion became My Fair Lady - and that helps, but more often than not we just have to suffer the revivals: admire the forward-thinking, the occasionally dazzling verbal flair, the socially switched-on-ness, and endure the long digressions on the finer points of Cambridge’s Tripos examination system.
So why on earth would you want to watch GBS now? Director Dominic Cooke gives us two enticements: one, he’s cut the play massively. Hour forty five straight through. Bang. Second, brothel-keeper Mrs Warren and her prim daughter Vivie are played by real life Imelda Staunton and real life daughter Bessie Carter (who happens to be in Bridgerton).
It’s not the first time this play has been nepo-ed. Only two years ago Caroline Quentin and her real life daughter Rose played Mrs and Miss Warren in a very solid production of the play that didn’t pretend to be anything other than a very solid production.
The problem with Cooke’s version is that it wants to be more. A circular set is fecund with flowers, with grass you want to frolic and get hayfever in, birds tweeting. Basically, summer. A really nice one. Above hangs a glowing disc, like the sun has slipped down too far.
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Chatting to a nice young man, Vivie Warren tells us (unprompted, at length) that she’s ‘a perfectly splendid modern young lady’. Trouble is, she’s only been allowed to become that by her mother’s lucrative line of work, which involves running a very successful chain of brothels.
That’s the clash: Vivie’s educated idealism and her mum’s hardscrabble realpolitik, bashed out in long speeches in a country garden.
On comes Staunton, looking spectacular in a striped dress and wide lacey hat (costumes by Chloe Lamford - Cooke knows how to do lavish and ravishing, see his Hello Dolly last year or his Follies in 2017, both with Staunton, both phenomenal). Straight-backed, with an accent that tries to suggest good breeding but slips into betraying Cockney vowels, Staunton’s Mrs Warren gets into sharper and sharper spats with Vivie about how the world really works, how it’s stacked against women, how sex work is one of the only ways of reclaiming power, not to mention simply surviving.
It’s Staunton doing what she does well, and has done before. Staunch, slightly terrifying. Every line a masterclass in technical precision, in full commitment. And here, it doesn’t work. She’s in a melodrama while everyone around her is in a pleasant garden comedy. She tramples over the humour, the fun, and that means the serious bits don’t stand out. She tries to make us care too deeply before we’ve even got to know her.
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That’s partly a problem with Cooke’s sharp scissors, which have removed a lot of Shaw’s bloat, but have also stopped us from spending enough time with the characters to ease into them. And even despite the excisions, the play still manages to drag.
One of the potential pitfalls of casting famous mothers and less famous daughters is that it’s Vivie who actually has to carry most of the scenes. But Carter does it very well, as precise as her mother, often simply standing in the middle of the stage and declaiming front-on to the audience. But, really, the fact they’re mother and daughter just doesn’t add anything than a marketing line.
Yes it’s all well acted, all looks nice, so why does it feel so mechanical? Aside from a group of ten women in nightdresses who come and strip away bits of stage and who, in a final stage picture, give the play its one chilling moment, surrounding Vivie in an accusatory way, the rest is just pleasantry.
Cooke’s slimline text and his lavish production turn a remarkably punchy 130-year old play into exactly what you fear an evening of Bernard Shaw might be: worthy and dull, plonked in the West End because it’s a too-tempting vehicle for an acting legend and a Bridgerton star. I hate to say it for a play about sex work, but it does feel transactional, like a bunch of professionals very competently going through the motions and never finding a way to connect.
Mrs Warren’s Profession is at the Garrick Theatre until 16 August
