THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By George Bernard Shaw
Garrick Theatre, 2 Charing Cross Rd, London WC2H 0HH until August 16, 2025
Real-life mother and daughter Imelda Staunton and Bessie Carter are clever casting for this rare revival of one of Shaw’s ‘problem’ plays, lovingly disinterred by Dominic Cooke.
Shaw’s plays are (and always were) Marmite. Some will claim they’re didactic and emotionally desiccated with a tendency to start with a lengthy polemical preface offering commentary on a pressing social problem then attaching a play. Others argue that if you look close enough and treat them properly they are vital and energizing works of drama that explore themes which are always current. Stylistically, too, they were ahead of their time and his influence on later playwrights was immense.
Here Staunton plays the formidable, wealthy, Mrs Kitty Warren, a former prostitute and now a CEO (as it were) of a chain of brothels across Europe. A natural enemy of the patriarchy, this sharp, intelligent, woman wasn’t going to remain a slave on a factory floor and so instead found her way to exploit the system, in the process making herself a fortune which funded her beloved daughter’s expensive education. The action hinges on her daughter finally discovering the truth about the mother’s past and her haughty rejection of mom.
Carter who has great stage presence (it’s in the genes! – as well as Staunton, her dad is Downton Abbey’s Jim Carter) is perfectly cast as Vivie. Tall, elegant, super bright, a twenty something know-it-all down from Oxford and a nascent Suffragette, Vivie is ravenously ambitious and determined to make it in a man’s world. She’s working at an auditors while embarking on a legal career and has decided to dispense with men, marriage and holidays. Distance has estranged her from her mother and their reunion here is inevitably prickly.
Staunton presents Warren as not having totally lost touch with her roots or accent but is clever enough to perform as required. She’s achieved her success by running rings round useless men. Here, it’s like a secondary role to the daughter, but Staunton comes into her own in the heartbreaking final confrontation.
One of the problems with the play is that the supporting parts are thinly drawn to the point of being extraneous. Robert Glenister is reliably polished as Warren’s cantankerous business partner and Kevin Doyle has fun with the insufferable and comically snobbish clergyman Rev. Gardner, whose son Frank (Ruben Joseph) has eyes for Vivie. Joseph is spirited but it’s an underwritten role. The cast is complete with Sid Sagar as the romantic idealist Mr Praed, basically a foil for the coldly utilitarian Vivie. The mother and daughter duologues are key to the drama and are delivered with great style but the bladder busting running time, at 1 hour 45 minutes, requires an interval.
Production values are a treat, solidly old fashioned and lavish. Chloe Lamford’s design locates the action beneath a giant domed skylight and the costumes are beautiful. Jon Clark’s lighting perfectly enhances the often lengthy discourses. An impressive visual innovation by Cooke is to add a silent Greek chorus of 10 young ladies in their bloomers, the ‘working girls’ whose labors fund the Warrens and who appear occasionally like specters.
The central argument of the piece, that prostitution was not caused by moral failure but by economic necessity, is just as alive in the era of OnlyFans, but it was daring stuff in 1893. The Lord Chamberlain (the censor) banned it of course, and outside of odd private performances it wasn’t performed publicly until 1925. Its critique of male privilege, hypocrisy in public life, and the pretense of fashionable morality are all bang up to date, as is the fretting about Oxbridge receiving ‘dirty’ money. Interesting too that Vivie professes to be asexual and unromantic, now the height of fashion.
