Although written in 1893, George Bernard Shaw’s
Mrs
Warren’s Profession wasn’t publically performed until 1925, “when
members of English society could no longer pretend that their world was the
epitome of true respectability and elegance.” And while this might, perhaps,
seem strange to a modern audience, in the 1890s Shaw’s famously strong socialist
opinions were deemed unsuitable for polite society. Originally classified as an
‘Unpleasant Play’ by Shaw himself, it could be read – seen, even – as a study
of prostitution, and its aim “to shew the prostitution is not the prostitute’s
fault but the fault of a society,” as Shaw wrote to a colleague. Yet, Mrs Warren’s Profession is “no more a
work “about” prostitution as a social crime than [Ibsen’s] Ghosts is “about” syphilis as a communicable disease.”
After their misconceived Pygmalion in 2012, I was at first wary
of the Sydney Theatre Company’s choice to produce another of Shaw’s plays. Very
much like Oscar Wilde (and Tom Stoppard on an good day), Shaw’s writing is
filled to the brim with dialogue and scenes which positively sparkle with the
fire of intelligence, wit and a playful subversiveness; whereas 2012’s Pygmalion found it early only to lose it
in the Sydney Theatre’s emptiness, Mrs
Warren’s Profession had it from the start, kept it and let it grow until
its conclusion, two-and-a-half hours later. It’s to director Sarah Giles’
credit that this production brings out the tensions apparent in Shaw’s play,
the core distinctions between mother and daughter, young and old, male and
female, father and son; wealth and poverty, virgin and whore, independence
and dependence, morality and depravity, marriage and a career. By re-examining
these oppositions anew Giles, along with her cast and team, has created a fresh, vibrant and I’m
almost tempted to call it a modern interpretation of one of the English
language’s greatest dramatist’s early works.
The set (by
Renée Mulder) was dominated by a pink flower-studded hedge-like curtain, stretches
across the width of the Wharf 1 stage, and is in many respects vaginal – it has
an enveloping, almost claustrophobic feel to it, as if the women – and,
perhaps, men – are trapped within it; in many respects, I guess that’s almost
what Shaw is getting at throughout the play. It is this entrapment, this
feeling of constriction that led Giles to set her production in the Shavian
period, complete
with corsets and bustles and long dresses. “It’s about restriction – for
men and women,” Giles says.
“Corsets and bustles do something to you.” Add to this a subtle and cleverly
used revolve and sparse furniture enough to suggest locations – folding chairs,
benches, and a hammock for the garden, a table and chairs for a study, a large
desk for the office – and you have a beautiful and elegant set which does not
detract but rather adds to the power of the play’s central argument about the
double standards which exist for men and women, still all too prevalent today,
one-hundred-and-twenty years later.
Giles’ cast were
all terrific: Lizzie Schebesta as Vivie was equally as passionate, worldly and
naïve as she needed to be, every bit as determined and iron-willed as her
mother, the titular Mrs Warren. As Mrs ‘Kitty’ Warren, Helen Thompson had the
bearing and the height necessary to make her a formidable woman, yet when she
was at her most vulnerable – in her private scenes with Vivie – you saw
underneath it a woman who was scared of losing everything, a woman determined
to escape the world she grew up in. Thompson’s voice, too, changed depending on
who she was talking to or what she was talking about: when she was in the
company of others, society if you will, her speech was that as befitted her
status, but when she was alone with Vivie, in their confrontations, her voice
became that the woman she once was,
her ‘real’ voice if you will. Eamon Farren as Frank was a cheeky, nimble,
largely good-natured young man, a kind of cross between Eddie Redmayne and
David Tennant, equal parts charming, serious and playful, yet never outstaying
his welcome. Simon Burke as Praed, an old friend of Mrs Warren’s, was
necessarily naïve in his outlook, concerned largely with the architecture and
the façade of aesthetic beauty than with whatever implications may come from it
or be hidden by it; yet his character was no less credible or less believable
for him being thus. Drew Forsythe as the Reverend was delightfully bumbling
and, though a small role, carried his character with aplomb and dignity (though
I couldn’t help but think of his many varied roles in the Wharf Revues at
times), while Martin Jacobs as George Crofts, Mrs Warren’s business partner,
was suitably boorish and beastly, a rather obnoxious, uncouth and lecherous man
with no tact or finesse. His scene in Act Three with Vivie was deliciously
awkward and rather ghastly, a portrayal only compounded by his character’s
motives and words, his mannerisms and development.
None of the
actors felt intrinsically separate from their characters – so far as I was
concerned, within the reality of the play, the actors were the characters; and
I suppose that’s also partly due to Shaw’s writing as much as Giles’ direction
– he “peopled the play with recognisable stereotypes, and turned them inside
out – mother, daughter, young lover, father, clergyman; even the [villainous]
Sir George Crofts. And he pursued his political argument via a deconstruction
of perhaps the most popular dramatic form in English, the romantic comedy.”
Shaw carries this inversion of the normal across into his narrative, particularly
at the end of Act Two. Following Mrs Warren’s disclosure of her ‘sordid past’
to her daughter, the conventional melodramatic practice would have been to mark
this point as the end of the “young heroine’s ordeal; in Shaw’s play it is only
the beginning.” In the following Act, in what are essentially two paired
scenes, we are shown [just two of] the various kinds of relationships which can
exist and which are presented to Vivie to choose from – the ‘holiday romance’
love she has with Frank, and the unctuous and skin-crawlingly spiteful kind of
love to be gotten from Crofts. In the final act, Shaw gives Vivie a moment in
which she makes her stance on love and relationships blatantly, painfully,
clear: “If we three are to remain friends,” she tells Frank and Praed
respectively, “I must be treated as a woman of business, permanently single and
permanently unromantic.” She then regards her mother as a threat to her self-determination
and conviction, not because of anything ‘immoral’ she finds within her, but
because she sees in her mother her own self, her own independent spirit. Vivie
realises that marriage, in whatever form and however romantic, “simply makes
the woman “licensed to be loved on the premises” – no different from the girls
who work in her mother’s brothels.”
In the final
moments of the play, as the stage plunges into a thick darkness, only Vivie
remains, sitting at her accountant’s desk, “delving into the great sheafs of
paper [in] order to lose herself in her work.” It’s a perfectly bleak and
exhilarating moment, not least because of the visual image of the desk slowly
turning on the revolve, the arced lamplight yellow and contained within the
space. And yet it is perfectly and sublimely Chekhovian in its resoluteness,
its ingrained display of inner strength and resolve, the “contrariness of its
signals: despair and contentment, disillusionment and hope for the future.” As
in many of Shaw’s later works, the events in this early play become moments in
a kind of spiritual education – “a cumulative process of disillusionment that
leaves its subject decimated but stronger and more resilient, better able to
bear life without illusion,” as Frederick J. Marker writes. The drama in Mrs Warren’s Profession, as in Chekhov,
“lies in the discovery and its consequences. [But these] consequences are cruel
enough, are all quite sensible and sober”, unlike in Chekhov’s work, so there
are “no suicides nor sensational tragedies of any sort.”
In a play that
was written for women, to be performed and produced by women, about women and
the defence of their rights (just as with Pygmalion),
it is remarkable for it to have been written by a man, albeit someone of Shaw’s
calibre and standing. And while Sarah Giles describes Shaw as being a
“feminist, [yet] still a product of his time,” perhaps we today can look at
Shaw’s play and find the “timeliness and the power [in] the lesson the play
teaches.” Perhaps, like Vivie, we can gain our education.
Theatre
playlist: 6. Reflection, Howard Shore
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