George Bernard Shaw’s scorching tour de force,Mrs Warren’s Profession, will be staged at the Manoel Theatre by MADC; it tells the story of Kitty Warren, a mother who makes a terrible sacrifice for her daughter Vivie’s independence. Tony Cassar Darien learns more
After consulting the local theatrical archives, it is hard to comprehend how George Bernard Shaw is the second most performed playwright in the English-speaking world, after the Bard.
Perhaps it’s because his renowned Fabian connections have always been frowned upon by the local theatrical fraternity which, unlike the situation in the rest of the world, have always belonged to the right of politics. The decision by MADC to stage a Shavian production for its April slot at the Manoel Theatre is therefore welcome and exciting.
In Shaw’s vast community of characters, the theatregoer will find a large assortment of women: saints, sinners, sphinxes and scatterbrains. Of these, none is more complex than the redoubtable brothel keeper Mrs Warren, a woman both fearsome and aggressive, who ultimately commands our grudging respect for her own powers of self-analysis.
By the time Mrs Warren’s Profession made its public debut in England in 1925, Shaw’s play had earned a rap sheet a mile long: banned from public production in London in 1894; called “revoltingly offensive” and “wholly evil” by the critics upon its first private production in 1902; shuttered after a single performance in New Haven in 1905; deemed “morally rotten” when it opened in New York a few days later, its entire cast arrested and charged with “offending public decency”.
“Ah, when I wrote that,” Shaw later confessed, “I had some nerve.”
Victorian England claimed to be outraged by the “great social evil” of prostitution even though the profession boomed throughout the last decades of the 19th century when one in 60 houses in London at this time was a brothel and one in 16 women a prostitute. Shaw shocked audiences by asserting that the honest work offered to lower-class women paid so meagerly that it drove them to the higher wages the Mrs Warrens of the world provided, since the respectable society that denounced the profession also created the demand for it.
Of course Shaw specialised in exposing uncomfortable truths to his audiences, scandalising them just as Vivie Warren is when she discovers that her mother’s sinful occupation paid for her upbringing. The celebrated author emphasises this in his novel Cashel Byron’s Profession, in which he describes how poverty forced a boxer into his brutal line of work (echoes of Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man starring Russell Crowe), and his plays Widowers’ Houses (about a young man who discovers how his income is derived from slum houses), and Major Barbara (about the woman whose father profits from weapons manufacturing).
Over a couple of espressos I discussed the forthcoming production with first-time MADC director Joyce Grech. She shares my view that the chief conflict in this play has always been the question: Who is more unsavoury? The brothel-madam mother or her cold-hearted daughter? Not an easy one to answer. Mrs Warren commands our respect as a fighter against poverty and offers an earnest defence of the industrialisation of her sex. However, she forfeits our admiration when she continues to ply her nefarious trade as a secure wealthy woman. This reveals that her corrupt behaviour is no longer motivated by a need to survive, but rather by her sheer greed.
The fact that her daughter Vivie launches her own commercial enterprise is undoubtedly owed to her generosity.
At least the mother had earned the money to educate her daughter to make a livelihood with her brain. Unfortunately, Warren Junior proves to be the only fly in her mum’s ointment.
Ms Grech is thrilled with her female leads, namely the dynamic Isabel Warrington, who has almost played the whole gamut of English middle-aged ladies, and Simone Spiteri, that young revelation whose dazzling role in Mario Philip Azzopardi’s latest play Xbihat, contributed in no small way towards making that unique production the talk of the town.
The male characters in the play (for whom Shaw seems to have a sense of underlying scorn) are being played by Colin Willis, Barry Calvert, Andrew Galea and Chris Hudson. Aware of the need to retain the period’s classical feel, the MADC have engaged the services of designer Peter Howitt, whose scenery depicting Scrooge’s Dickensian England, earned the artist spontaneous gasps of approval from impressed audiences during MADC’s last pantomime.
• Mrs Warren’s Profession is being staged by MADC at the Manoel Theatre on April 8-10 and April 15-17. Tickets may be obtained by phone on 2124 6389, e-mail: bookings@teatrumanoel.com.mt or online: www.teatrumanoel.com.mt