The stage is a picture-perfect English garden, all pastel foxgloves and iced-cake fences. Yet within minutes George Bernard Shaw’s anarchic spirit starts slicing through the prettiness. Director Dominic Cooke delivers the play in a single breath, about one hour forty minutes, stripping away interval niceties so the ideas land before they cool and your bladder is screaming for relief.
Shaw’s starting point is simple. Vivie Warren, fresh from Cambridge with a head full of mathematics and ambition, meets her mother properly for the first time in years. Mrs Kitty Warren has funded her daughter’s education by running a chain of high-class brothels across Europe, although that doesn’t become obvious to her daughter until the end of the play. Around them flutter a useless rector with secrets of his own (played by Moseley from Downton Abbey), a louche fortune hunter, a pompous baronet and a genial aesthete who thinks art can save everyone. As the genteel garden setting rotates, so do the loyalties. You start charmed by Vivie’s self-possession, then see how fast her certainty turns to steel when she glimpses the human cost behind the cheque book that paid for her privilege. You laugh at Kitty’s bluff jokes, then feel the sting when she lists the poverty that drove her choices.
The real-life mother-and-daughter casting delivers fireworks. Imelda Staunton makes Kitty a pint-size juggernaut, sashaying in vibrant stripes, dropping her h’s just enough to hint at backstreet origins. She rolls each of Shaw’s barbs round her mouth like a fine Scotch, then spits them with perfect timing. When she finally unleashes her life story you feel the air change. Imelda Staunton’s actual daughter, Bessie Carter, plays her character’s daughter, Vivie. Vivie is tall, cool, and a Cambridge blade honed for battle. She treats every social nicety like a maths problem to be solved, and Carter shows the calculation ticking behind her eyes. In the two big confrontations the women circle each other like champion fencers. Kitty pleads for understanding, Vivie demands moral clarity, and you hear the audience shifting in their seats, pulled first one way, then the other. At the line ‘Who will look after me when I am old?’, Staunton’s voice cracks and the room freezes. No gimmick, just acting of the highest order.
The men orbiting this duel are sketched with comic precision. Reuben Joseph’s Frank Gardner is a cheeky puppy, breezing about in linen whites until a late-game revelation renders his flirtation hilariously, horribly taboo. Moseley’s (also known as Kevin Doyle’s) Reverend Gardner layers piety with panic, forever clutching his collar as though hoping to strangle the gossip before it escapes. Robert Glenister oozes smug entitlement as Sir George Crofts, a walking embodiment of capital in cufflinks; his marriage offer to Vivie prompts an audible collective shudder. Sid Sagar supplies gentle warmth as Praed, the only character who seems to like art for art’s sake, but even he blinks when the facade falls.
Chloe Lamford’s revolving design is a sly visual essay. The play opens in a summer postcard, then scene by scene the flowers depart. A silent chorus of women in white shifts dismantles the garden, revealing bare boards and chalk-white walls beneath. By the final showdown Vivie’s office is a stark cube, the only colour of her own rage. These spectres of unrecorded sex workers hover at the edges of scenes, a wordless reminder that every comfort on stage rests on unseen labour. Jon Clark’s lighting shifts from golden afternoon to surgical glare, while Christopher Shutt’s soundscape lets early birdsong fade into quiet. The volume could do with a bit of turning up; from row M in the stalls, we had to strain to make out some of the dialogue over the birdsong.
Emotionally the evening creeps up on you. Early scenes fizz with champagne comedy, complete with lightly farcical exits through French doors. Gradually the pressure tightens, the jokes curdle, and by the time mother and daughter square off at that lone desk the production feels one step from tragedy.
The language has an Edwardian lilt but actors speak it clean. Fans of Staunton from Hello Dolly, Harry Potter, Gypsy or The Crown will come for her star wattage and leave stunned by her ferocity. Even Bridgerton devotees will recognise the corsets and gossip, though here the carriage rides lead to moral brinkmanship rather than ballroom dances.
What makes this Mrs Warren’s Profession so vital is its refusal to let you off the hook. The play’s central question, can you condemn the means by which a woman survives in a world rigged against her, when the alternatives are so much worse?.This echoes in contemporary debates about sex work, economic precarity, and the moral compromises demanded by capitalism.
The revival is not flawless. A couple of late twists arrive so fast they feel like footnotes, and some will miss the gentler charm of a full-length version (and an interval). There are moments when you’re thinking, ‘Get on with it’. The play was once labelled morally rotten, and was banned by government censor’s when first produced. From 2025’s vantage it looks morally forensic, and timeless.
