23-05-2025
Mrs Warren's Profession: Imelda Staunton and her daughter make a winning double act
This classy, period-dressed production of one of Bernard Shaw's best-known plays brings Imelda Staunton back to the West End as Mrs Warren, a woman of means who harbours the societally unacceptable secret that her wealth derives from prostitution (formerly her own, now that of others in 'hotels' she manages in Europe). What's not to like?
Well, at the risk of sounding like an ingrate, I'd say Dominic Cooke's briskly efficient, interval-free revival courts seeming a bit anodyne, especially given the PR promise that Cooke and co are bringing this once contentious, long-banned 1894 work 'crashing into the 21st century' (they don't).
That said, few should pass up the opportunity to see Staunton on stage. Even laying aside the fact that she has been the Queen in The Crown, she qualifies as revered acting royalty.
A musicals doyenne of late (witness her Olivier-winning turn in Hello, Dolly!), without breaking into song she can still rivet attention with just a glance or a twitch of the shoulders. An added draw is that her daughter, Bessie Carter, has been cast as Mrs W's vivacious, anti-sentimental and recalcitrant offspring Vivie. Though physically dissimilar, Carter (a star of Bridgerton) carries her mater's thespian DNA in her sparkle and subtlety – a smirk, a bemused look, and you're hooked. (Others may spot affinities with her father Jim, Downton's Mr Carson; a game you can play all night.)
The big scenes between mother and daughter are quietly tremendous, and crackle with a genuine sense of a familial bond without becoming cosy. When Kitty spells out just what a wretched life she narrowly escaped by going on the game, you see the scales fall from Vivie's eyes and sympathy flower.
Staunton gives her character a nicely brittle air, combining defiance and defensiveness, with a residual cockney accent – an obstacle to full respectability which she perforce craves instead for her girl. When that status is spurned, for trading on the exploitation of other women – Vivie resolving to forge her own proto-feminist path of toil – you glimpse how crushed, wounded and lonely Mrs Warren is and the comfortless and possibly childless world Vivie's noble resolve may result in.
Despite being of its time, their showdown conveys the age-old tussle between parent and child and crystalises the ethical wrench between improving one's lot and not hurting others. Topical in a way – what hidden agonies fund well-heeled or Western lifestyles today? – but elsewhere a tepidity sets in.
The mute, scene-shifting contributions of a female chorus in undergarments, sporting accusatory looks to mournful music, feel reductively decorative and aren't enough to save Chloe Lamford's sparse, black-walled set from visual insufficiency.
The male actors handle their polished but sometimes still dusty side of the dialogue with stiff dependability – among them Robert Glenister as a creepily predatory elder businessman, and Kevin Doyle as a comically twitchy, archetypally compromised vicar, with a past of his own. Shaw, the old radical, would be glad to see how his work has endured – but wouldn't he also want it showing a bit more fire in its belly?
