The Sydney Theatre Company’s Sarah Giles delivers a measured and technically accomplished production of one of George Bernard Shaw’s most popular plays; a provocative exploration of gender roles and the hypocrisy of certain bourgeois modes of moralising. The moral arguments between the two protagonists, Mrs Kitty Warren (Helen Thomson) and her daughter Vivie (Lizzie Schebesta) concerning prostitution and poverty are as striking now as when the play premiered over a hundred years ago.
Kitty Warren is a vivacious, acerbic successful brothel owner and former sex worker herself. She lives a cosmopolitan, financially comfortable life, which has allowed her daughter to attend elite English private schools, and even Cambridge. However, the stresses of the job and the secrecy she shrouds her operations in has left little time for bonding with her daughter. Following Vivie’s graduation, Kitty arrives in England, where the two women begin to jointly uncover family history.
Thomson is powerful as Warren, deftly carrying off the quick-witted parry and riposte of her banter with business partner Crofts (Martin Jacobs) and her daughter’s love interest, Frank Gardner (Eamon Farren). This is counterpointed by the more reflective and earnest exchanges with her friend Praed (Simon Burke) who senses the divergent sensibilities of the two women about to tear them apart, and hopelessly attempts to prevent it. One minor blemish was the morphing of the Cockney accent Thomson used into a broad Aussie accent at times, which sounded odd.
The emotional climaxes come in the raw, dynamic exchanges between mother and daughter as Kitty’s pragmatism clashes with Vivie’s principles. Schebesta did well with most of the lines, but her monotone drone felt nauseating at times. Despite it perhaps being what Shaw had intended for her character, there was a certain flatness there. The Reverend Samuel Gardner (Drew Forsythe) was appropriately awkward and falsely prudish, serving as the butt of many anti-clerical jokes.
Through these conflicts, Shaw delivers a humorous, incisive critique of the hypocrisy of bourgeois moralising, as well as the exploitative underbelly of capitalism. Bertolt Brecht wrote of him: ‘The Shavian terror consists of Shaw’s insistence on the prerogative of every man to act decently, logically, and with a sense of humor, and on the obligation to act in this manner in the face of opposition’. Standing contrary to this insistence was Shaw’s own behaviour on occasions, as he purportedly borrowed the original idea for the play from a female friend of his, after initially vehemently criticising her version.
There were some jarring directorial decisions from Giles, such as the choice of music used in the intervening period between acts, but this was a good performance on the whole.
Rating: 4 stars
Sydney Theatre Company present
Mrs Warren’s Profession
By George Bernard Shaw
Director: Sarah Giles
Assistant Director: Harriet Gillies
Designer: Renee Mulder
Lighting Designer: Nigel Levings
Composer & Sound: Max Lyandvert
Voice & Text Coach: Charmian Gradwell
Cast: Lizzie Schebesta, Simon Burke, Helen Thomson, Martin Jacobs, Eamon Farren, Drew Forsythe
Wharf 1, Walsh Bay
14 February – 6 April
Return season: 4 – 20 July
