Plush Richmond Theatre and its respectable audience (in all senses, though its proneness to coughing was virtuosic) make a strikingly appropriate setting to bring out how Shaw’s early (1894 – but banned until 1902) play is on the one hand entirely conventional in its structure and stage-craft and on the other still challenging in its social attitudes and messages.
      The opening, a hot day in the country, is almost Chekhovian: white suits, a grande dame awaited, mentions of art and anarchy, albeit in a rather British way (the country house is a cottage near the town of Haslemere -- a name of almost Gilbertian resonanc -- not a magnificent if cash-strapped estate). But rapidly, it becomes all about the issues and what the characters have to say about them.
      There is one secret – that of Mrs Warren’s profession, known to some of her friends but not to her daughter Vivie, just down from Cambridge where she has secured “the equivalent” of being Third Wrangler (no actual degrees for women then) and reading law books to prepare herself for her settled intention of working on actuarial calculations in Honoria Fraser’s chambers in Chancery Lane. When Mrs Warren arrives, chic and like some Arkadina unwilling to be in the country, it becomes apparent that mother and daughter are not intimate.
      This is a chamber piece, with the small cast of characters swapping places on stage fairly rapidly and on more or less convincing pretexts (the adjoining cottage dining room is too small for everyone to sit down in, come and look at the church and so on). The characters are Praed, vaguely an artist and teacher, Sir George Crofts, a middle aged bachelor of means who turns out to be Mrs Warren’s backer (he sunk £40,000 into her business and has had a handsome return), the local vicar Mr Gardner (with a dissolute past; possibly Vivie’s father), his son Frank, winsomely in love with Vivie, and Mrs Warren and her daughter.
      There is one scene which almost becomes dramatic, when Mrs Warren and Frank flirt and cross a boundary with a knowing kiss, but otherwise it is all dialogue, occasionally with raised voices, but never soaring or searing. Shaw’s concern is not to show characters developing or being struck down by tragedy, but to hit the audience with his clear-sighted views about the issues.
      Once they are alone, Mrs Warren simply tells Vivie for the first time about her life and her work. Why this particular evening; why not before – we are not told. Shaw is principally interested in the economics of it and society’s hypocrisy about the causes: women will go into prostitution and providing services of that kind when they have no more attractive choice. Mrs Warren is proud of her achievements and of having run her own show rather than have her looks exploited by the owner of a pub or take a miserably paid factory job (like a half-sister who died of lead poisoning). Crofts has taken the money; but then, as he says, everyone is living off immoral earnings when it comes down to it. He also, with the dramatist’s apparent approval, presents the concept of marriage (which he offers Vivie as a good deal) as merely a more conventionally acceptable way of packaging a similarly exploitative commercial transaction.
      Vivie is the moral heart of the play. When she is told about the means by which her mother bettered herself and beat the system she is entirely impressed and not judgmental. Shocking to the late Victorians (when the play was banned); still sounding enlightened to us today. What ultimately Vivie cannot tolerate is her subsequent discovery of the fact that, having made herself independent, her mother has not wound up the business but continues to run the string of comfortable little houses in Ostend, Brussels, Vienna and Budapest (a wonderful fin-de-siecle quality to that litany; references to the gaiety of Brussels secured cheap laughs from the audience) and loves the money and the things it buys.
      And at the end, Vivie simply cuts herself off: from her mother, from the feckless chump Frank and from the whole boiling. She will make her own way as a legitimate and self-supporting service provider. So far, so modern and dignified. What is less clear is why Shaw presents her as heartless and philistine: she does not care for art (on a very limited exposure: she hated the National Gallery and a Wagner evening) and she does not mind if she never sees Italy. Perhaps even Shaw could not then see that a woman could make her way in the world and have a soul and perhaps even a lover.
      The acting of this didactic script is of even quality (no imbalance, for example, between the hugely experienced Felicity Kendal, whose Mrs Warren looks well on her Bad Life, and the newcomer Lucy Briggs-Owen) without many highs and no real lows. They speak the beautifully lucid lines with admirable clarity and the direction is also very clean. The sets are straightforward. The fact is that Shaw became a better dramatist later on, albeit not always less of a polemicist. He was a man of amazing foresight and his views even today would do great credit to the average Guardian reader. This play does not have much that will make you laugh or suffer emotion but the presentation of the issues is acute and thought provoking and the whole thing utterly – well, professional.
James Flynn