The Shaw Festival's current production of Mrs. Warren's Profession is powerful, engrossing, and a first-rate staging of one of Shaw's tautest, toughest plays.
In three of his earliest plays, published under the title of Plays Unpleasant, George Bernard Shaw was preoccupied with the social issues and ills of the day. In this one respect, his work resembles that of Henrik Ibsen, whose plays Shaw helped to bring to the British stage. But Shaw's treatment of his subject matter is often much more subtle, more leavened with humour to keep the audience off guard while he feeds them his moral lessons. It's also striking to note that even now, well over a century after the play was written, the attitudes of Shaw's characters still sometimes can startle his audiences. In many ways, the man was not only ahead of his time but ahead of ours as well.
In three of his earliest plays, published under the title of Plays Unpleasant, George Bernard Shaw was preoccupied with the social issues and ills of the day. In this one respect, his work resembles that of Henrik Ibsen, whose plays Shaw helped to bring to the British stage. But Shaw's treatment of his subject matter is often much more subtle, more leavened with humour to keep the audience off guard while he feeds them his moral lessons. It's also striking to note that even now, well over a century after the play was written, the attitudes of Shaw's characters still sometimes can startle his audiences. In many ways, the man was not only ahead of his time but ahead of ours as well.
Mrs. Warren's Profession, originally staged privately in 1902 (nine years after Shaw wrote it) is a noteworthy exception. In many ways, it's one of Shaw's most Ibsen-like scripts -- which may help to explain the rarity with which it is staged. That paucity of stage productions may also turn on the relative lack of humour as compared to, say, The Philanderer. More than anything else, though, I think that Mrs. Warren's Profession simply cuts too close to the bone in confronting a societal issue which is as much a mess now as in Shaw's day. Our utter failure to make any progress in dealing with the whole area of prostitution and its causes is something most people would rather not be forced to think about.
That is truly unfortunate, because this play presents a powerful study of several fascinating characters, chief among them Vivie Warren and her mother, the title character. Mrs. Warren may be the title character, but Vivie is the prime mover of the action of the play -- and it really is her story, not her mother's, which is unfolded to us. And it is Vivie who emerges as the victor, the only one to get exactly what she wants, out of the battle royal which takes place.
Any attempt to describe the plot of Mrs. Warren's Profession is apt to leave it sounding melodramatic but even a tolerably competent performance shows just how wrong this assumption is, and the point is driven home even more forcibly in Shaw's preface to the published edition of the play.
In the fashionable nineteenth-century melodrama, the "fallen woman" is always a beautiful, emotional creature whose "sin" is redeemed by the man who loves her even after he finds out who or what she is. Since this is also a social sin of the first order, he can only be redeemed in turn after she dies -- a victim of consumption (La Traviata), swamp fever (Manon Lescaut) or suicide (The Second Mrs. Tanqueray). Shaw's depiction of the relationships surrounding Mrs. Warren is full of conventional people who keep trying to take the story in that direction -- including Mrs. Warren herself -- but Vivie overpowers them all.
Her weapon, by the way, is the dramatic reversal of conventional expectation. From first to last, this was one of Shaw's principal dramatic techniques. In many of his more comedic plays, it becomes simply a clever writer's tool to generate unexpected laughs. But in Mrs. Warren's Profession, the reversals form the essence of the drama as Vivie Warren shows herself to be the natural antagonist of all the social expectations and character traits represented by all the others.
I think that director Eda Holmes has understood this very well. Her staging of the piece is designed to draw attention to Vivie in many subtle ways, and to highlight the opposition of Vivie to almost everyone else on the stage. Pacing was subtly varied, but the forward motion of the play never impaired in the least.
The artistic team has chosen to set the play in contemporary time, in the lounge of the New Lyric Gentlemen's Club in London, which was the site of the first private performance. It's a cute but slightly cross-purposed conception. Patrick Clark's beautiful set is a London gentleman's club to the life, and adroitly echoes the architecture of the Royal George Theatre's auditorium, giving the audience an even closer feel of integration into the Club's lounge. Costumes, then, are much more contemporary in style. But the set undermines its own cleverness because it looks so old. It still has the effect, in spite of costumes and modern-style acting, of dragging the play back into the past when it was written.
But no matter: the play crackles throughout with dramatic power and intensity. Jennifer Dzialoszynski completely owns the stage from first to last as Vivie, and in the end compels all the others to do her will. I've seen her a couple of times before in comical roles, and she was masterly in those. The dramatic weight and multiple dimensions of her assumption of Vivie Warren are another matter altogether. Dzialoszynski's performance rang almost all the changes demanded by the author and brought a complex, many-sided character to perfectly clear life.
Opposed to her we had Nicole Underhay as Mrs. Warren, the professional prostitute and brothel-owner. From her breezy and casual entrance, to her conventional parental talking-down to her daughter, to the powerhouse scene in which she describes her life and family and her decision to go into her field of work, Underhay too covered all the aspects of a different but equally fascinating character.
The one weak link in the show for me was the very last scene in which Vivie dismisses first Frank, and then her mother. Shaw's text suggests to me a woman whose mind is completely made up, who eschews emotion, and lets her mother's impassioned pleas beat upon her like waves against a cliff. If Vivie is to crack at all, it should be only momentary -- and I felt that Dzialoszynski came far too close to the emotional edge, breaking down into tears and losing her self-control for more than a few moments. But after she recovered herself it was Underhay who fell apart completely at the seams in the end. And that is as the playwright tells us it should be.
Thom Marriott created a truly imposing, suavely threatening Sir George Crofts (Mrs. Warren's business partner). The scene in which he outlined marriage as a business proposal to Vivie fairly made my flesh creep. It was then equally fascinating to watch him be baffled by Vivie's adroit thrusts in debate, terrified by Frank's sudden appearance with the gun, and then how quickly he recovered all his smoothness and false civility when he revealed Vivie's possible status as Frank's half sister before walking easily out of the garden.
Gray Powell did all he could with the ungrateful role of Praed, the innocent in a nest of knowing manipulators. His exposition of the role of art and beauty in life was as believable as it could be made, for this is the one character created by Shaw as a voice of a socially conventional set of attitudes.
Shawn Wright as the Reverend Samuel Gardner presented us with a performance of doubts hidden inside a shell of bitter rectitude, and his morning-after scene was a nice little light-comic interlude.
As his son, Frank, Wade Bogert-O'Brien did once again what he does best. Shaw here presented his take on the conventional, brainless, ne'er-do-well young British man about town. While Frank begins by looking and sounding just like so many of the species who littered the society of the period, he goes a good deal further. And this is where Bogert-O'Brien's performance really began to take off and fly on its own steam: in the garden scene when he appears with the gun to challenge Crofts. Of course, he is just as quickly upstaged by Vivie's seizure of the gun a moment after Crofts leaves, but the new tone he sets here carries on through the rest of the play. It's a good indication that this actor has a lot more in him than the vacuous types he too often seems condemned to play at Shaw.
On that note, I have to say that the Shaw Festival is in danger of becoming a victim of its own success. There's a large audience of faithful yearly attendees, and they dearly love to see all their favourite actors year after year. But I think this theatre ensemble is in danger of becoming too comfortable in its own skin, and will turn into a living monument to itself. A good indication of that risk is the situation of Wade Bogert-O'Brien and several others like him in the company.
This is a problem which bedevils all large theatrical institutions from time to time. It has certainly happened at several eras in the past with Stratford, and is also a major issue with Soulpepper in Toronto right now. It would be a very good thing to inject new blood into the Shaw company, put new faces on the stages, bring in new directors who will in turn suggest truly new approaches. The last step is already in the works under incoming artistic director Tim Carroll, and I certainly hope that a shake-up and revitalizing of the acting company will follow.
At the moment, though, what matters is that we have here a taut, incisive, splendidly powerful performance of Mrs. Warren's Profession which is definitely a must-see production.
Any attempt to describe the plot of Mrs. Warren's Profession is apt to leave it sounding melodramatic but even a tolerably competent performance shows just how wrong this assumption is, and the point is driven home even more forcibly in Shaw's preface to the published edition of the play.
In the fashionable nineteenth-century melodrama, the "fallen woman" is always a beautiful, emotional creature whose "sin" is redeemed by the man who loves her even after he finds out who or what she is. Since this is also a social sin of the first order, he can only be redeemed in turn after she dies -- a victim of consumption (La Traviata), swamp fever (Manon Lescaut) or suicide (The Second Mrs. Tanqueray). Shaw's depiction of the relationships surrounding Mrs. Warren is full of conventional people who keep trying to take the story in that direction -- including Mrs. Warren herself -- but Vivie overpowers them all.
Her weapon, by the way, is the dramatic reversal of conventional expectation. From first to last, this was one of Shaw's principal dramatic techniques. In many of his more comedic plays, it becomes simply a clever writer's tool to generate unexpected laughs. But in Mrs. Warren's Profession, the reversals form the essence of the drama as Vivie Warren shows herself to be the natural antagonist of all the social expectations and character traits represented by all the others.
I think that director Eda Holmes has understood this very well. Her staging of the piece is designed to draw attention to Vivie in many subtle ways, and to highlight the opposition of Vivie to almost everyone else on the stage. Pacing was subtly varied, but the forward motion of the play never impaired in the least.
The artistic team has chosen to set the play in contemporary time, in the lounge of the New Lyric Gentlemen's Club in London, which was the site of the first private performance. It's a cute but slightly cross-purposed conception. Patrick Clark's beautiful set is a London gentleman's club to the life, and adroitly echoes the architecture of the Royal George Theatre's auditorium, giving the audience an even closer feel of integration into the Club's lounge. Costumes, then, are much more contemporary in style. But the set undermines its own cleverness because it looks so old. It still has the effect, in spite of costumes and modern-style acting, of dragging the play back into the past when it was written.
But no matter: the play crackles throughout with dramatic power and intensity. Jennifer Dzialoszynski completely owns the stage from first to last as Vivie, and in the end compels all the others to do her will. I've seen her a couple of times before in comical roles, and she was masterly in those. The dramatic weight and multiple dimensions of her assumption of Vivie Warren are another matter altogether. Dzialoszynski's performance rang almost all the changes demanded by the author and brought a complex, many-sided character to perfectly clear life.
Opposed to her we had Nicole Underhay as Mrs. Warren, the professional prostitute and brothel-owner. From her breezy and casual entrance, to her conventional parental talking-down to her daughter, to the powerhouse scene in which she describes her life and family and her decision to go into her field of work, Underhay too covered all the aspects of a different but equally fascinating character.
The one weak link in the show for me was the very last scene in which Vivie dismisses first Frank, and then her mother. Shaw's text suggests to me a woman whose mind is completely made up, who eschews emotion, and lets her mother's impassioned pleas beat upon her like waves against a cliff. If Vivie is to crack at all, it should be only momentary -- and I felt that Dzialoszynski came far too close to the emotional edge, breaking down into tears and losing her self-control for more than a few moments. But after she recovered herself it was Underhay who fell apart completely at the seams in the end. And that is as the playwright tells us it should be.
Thom Marriott created a truly imposing, suavely threatening Sir George Crofts (Mrs. Warren's business partner). The scene in which he outlined marriage as a business proposal to Vivie fairly made my flesh creep. It was then equally fascinating to watch him be baffled by Vivie's adroit thrusts in debate, terrified by Frank's sudden appearance with the gun, and then how quickly he recovered all his smoothness and false civility when he revealed Vivie's possible status as Frank's half sister before walking easily out of the garden.
Gray Powell did all he could with the ungrateful role of Praed, the innocent in a nest of knowing manipulators. His exposition of the role of art and beauty in life was as believable as it could be made, for this is the one character created by Shaw as a voice of a socially conventional set of attitudes.
Shawn Wright as the Reverend Samuel Gardner presented us with a performance of doubts hidden inside a shell of bitter rectitude, and his morning-after scene was a nice little light-comic interlude.
As his son, Frank, Wade Bogert-O'Brien did once again what he does best. Shaw here presented his take on the conventional, brainless, ne'er-do-well young British man about town. While Frank begins by looking and sounding just like so many of the species who littered the society of the period, he goes a good deal further. And this is where Bogert-O'Brien's performance really began to take off and fly on its own steam: in the garden scene when he appears with the gun to challenge Crofts. Of course, he is just as quickly upstaged by Vivie's seizure of the gun a moment after Crofts leaves, but the new tone he sets here carries on through the rest of the play. It's a good indication that this actor has a lot more in him than the vacuous types he too often seems condemned to play at Shaw.
On that note, I have to say that the Shaw Festival is in danger of becoming a victim of its own success. There's a large audience of faithful yearly attendees, and they dearly love to see all their favourite actors year after year. But I think this theatre ensemble is in danger of becoming too comfortable in its own skin, and will turn into a living monument to itself. A good indication of that risk is the situation of Wade Bogert-O'Brien and several others like him in the company.
This is a problem which bedevils all large theatrical institutions from time to time. It has certainly happened at several eras in the past with Stratford, and is also a major issue with Soulpepper in Toronto right now. It would be a very good thing to inject new blood into the Shaw company, put new faces on the stages, bring in new directors who will in turn suggest truly new approaches. The last step is already in the works under incoming artistic director Tim Carroll, and I certainly hope that a shake-up and revitalizing of the acting company will follow.
At the moment, though, what matters is that we have here a taut, incisive, splendidly powerful performance of Mrs. Warren's Profession which is definitely a must-see production.
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