In Mrs Warren’s Profession, Imelda Staunton outshines her real-life daughter ...Middle East

Imelda Staunton and director Dominic Cooke have enjoyed a most fruitful working relationship in recent years. First of all, Staunton starred in Cooke’s production of the Sondheim musical Follies at the National.

Then, last year, she bagged her fifth Olivier Award for her phenomenal turn in his revival of Hello, Dolly!.

This latest outing doesn’t quite manage to complete a hat-trick of undisputed triumphs, but it is never less than a fascinating evening’s theatre.

The USP of this project is that Staunton stars alongside her real-life daughter, Bessie Carter, in George Bernard Shaw’s 1893 drama about a complex relationship between Mrs Warren, a mother with a dark past, and Vivie, the confident young woman who is the daughter she barely knows.

Given that Shaw’s plays are not celebrated for their pithy conciseness, Cooke has taken the sensible decision to edit this one down sharply, so that it now runs at 105 minutes without an interval.

Cooke has described his process as shaping the work into a Greek tragedy, in which characters are forced to reckon with the heavy consequences of decisions taken in their past.

This is a sharp and clever idea, but one unfortunate by-product is that it leaves the four male characters, in particular, seeming underdeveloped and two-dimensional.

Quite why the accomplished Vivie, who has just taken a maths degree at Cambridge, would be wasting her time with the rakish fool Frank Gardner (Reuben Joseph) is a mystery.

Still, the mood is nervously jovial when Mrs Warren arrives for a meeting with Vivie, who has no idea about the identity of her father or how her mother paid for the education she has enjoyed.

The difficult answer is that Mrs Warren was involved in “that business”, the profession that dared not speak its name in respectable, hypocritical Victorian society (although Cooke has shifted the action forward 20 years, to 1913), first as a prostitute and then as the madam of a string of European brothels.

Shaw’s stinging social critique lays into the desperate lack of choice and opportunity available to lower-class women and his words around the morals and ethics of sex work continue to resound strongly today.

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The production offers up occasional moments of huge emotion, all of which come from Staunton, who convincingly suggests a woman who did her best for her daughter without truly thinking through the consequences. Carter, known for her work in Bridgerton and Dear Octopus at the National last year, struggles slightly with her role, making Vivie’s looks and gestures unhelpfully over-emphatic at times.

An inspired move of Cooke’s – in keeping with his Greek tragedy theme – is to have a silent chorus of women in Edwardian scanties haunt the stage in between scenes; it’s a chilling reminder of all the work that paid for Vivie’s university education.

Chloe Lamford’s beautiful set of a raised circular garden blooming with foxgloves speaks initially of Bloomsbury Group ideas and ideals, of beauty and female emancipation, yet by the end of the play everything – garden and people – all have an entirely changed aspect.

‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’ is at the Garrick Theatre until 16th August (nimaxtheatres.com)

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