It really is astonishing how much of George Bernard Shaw’s century-old play remains pertinent.  

…it’s to the great credit of director Tony Cownie that Shaw’s arguments sparkle like the repartee of the most frivolous of comedies. Thanks to a near-perfect cast, the characters are far more human, not mere ciphers for the playwright’s debate.

In the title role, Paola Dionisotti never loses the music-hall abrasiveness from under the surface of her gaudy but genteel appearance.

… Emma Stansfield … a performance of intelligence, empathy and wit.  

Mark Fisher, The Guardian  

 

George Bernard Shaw’s early play remains as vitriolic and relevant as when it was first suppressed.

In this strong production, director Tony Cownie has managed to bring out all the social subtexts with which Shaw was concerned.

… it is Emma Stansfield … who creates all the sensuality on the stage, innocent though she makes it be.

All told, an uncompromising production, packed with ideas, that … produces some great pieces of acting.

 

Emma Stansfield, best known for her stint in Coronation Street, is superb as Vivie. From her first raised eyebrow to her final defiant stare, she commands the audience’s attention, steamrollering her way to independence and breaking hearts as well as taboos as she goes.

Anthony Eden’s Frank is equally magnetic – charming, witty and wickedly disrespectful of his elders. The young pair have no shortage of easy targets. Richard Addison perfectly captures the permanent discomfort of Frank’s feeble clergyman father, while Dougal Lee’s Sir George Crofts is monstrous and pathetic in just the right proportions.

 

… its exposure of male hypocrisy retains considerable bite …

Tony Cownie’s elegant and handsome-looking production takes its subject as seriously as Mrs Warren herself takes her booming business.

Paola Dionisotti is a vision in purple as Mrs Warren, betraying her humble roots in the face of her daughter’s defiance, given dignified poise by Emma Stansfield. Dougal Lee makes for a thoroughly nasty moustache-twirling villain as Crofts in this still pertinent questioning of a system where supply and demand still lead to exploitation.

Neil Cooper, The Herald

 

Angry assault on sexual hypocrisy, with nice hats

… the wonderful Paola Dionisotti takes the stage in a superbly good-looking production …

The remarkable Dionisotti makes a brave effort to lift her performance beyond period cliché, her voice and manner slipping dangerously, as Shaw demands, between faux-genteel and hard-edged Cockney. She is surrounded by fine supporting performances, notably from John Bett and Dougal Lee as her closest male friends, and is almost matched for strength and subtlety by Emma Stansfield as her damaged but indomitable daughter.

… there’s more than enough subtle darkness - in Tony Cownie’s production and Neil Murray’s beautiful, gently stylised design - to provide some food for thought.

Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman

 

Strong central performances combine with punctilious attention to detail in Tony Cownie’s direction to ensure that Shaw’s early and little-performed play receives a dynamic and digestible production …

… Vivie, brilliantly observed by Emma Stansfield…

Strong design by Neil Murray - costumes that help set tone and character and a clear, representational set

 

... how relevant his impassioned satire is…

…Tony Cownie’s carefully considered and handsome production …

Paola Dionisotti is an excellent choice for the title role. Her Mrs Warren has the adopted air of the happily debauched upper-class men who have, for decades, been her clients. With her accent suspended somewhere between Hackney and Hampstead, she appears to breeze through life with the confidence of a successful businesswoman. Yet, when applied to her morally upright daughter Vivie (Emma Stansfield, on admirably starchy form), her self-confidence is misplaced; a fact which Dionisotti makes brilliantly apparent in her body language.

People don’t drop pins in theatres any more, but, if they did, you could have heard one in the Lyceum as Mrs Warren recounted her early life.

In the midst of a universally strong cast, John Bett (always a fine dandy) is marvellously complacent, yet somehow admirable, as the liberal-minded artist Mr Praed. Dougal Lee is often reminiscent of the late, famously rakish Tory MP Alan Clark in the role of the louche Crofts…

This fine period production of Shaw’s early feminist play is, sadly, timely.

The Sunday Herald

 

Tony Cownie directs Shaw’s drama (in a co-production for the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, and the Nottingham Playhouse) with barely a nod to the 114 years that have elapsed since it was written … This is an astute decision, allowing Shaw’s radical social critique to speak both to his own times and to ours.

Paola Dionisotti plays the nouveau riche prostitute-turned-madame Mrs Warren with a tremendous combination of waspishness, regret and mental clarity. She leads an excellent cast, including Emma Stansfield as Mrs W’s respectable, emotionally retarded daughter Vivie and Antony Eden as the deliciously swaggering young man Frank Gardner.

 

Shaw’s vivid play makes use of the melodramatic conventions of his day, even bringing in a bold bad baronet with designs upon the young maiden, but his characterisation is so rich and the confrontations — in particular those between mother and daughter — so passionate that the play grips heart and mind.

Its energy and wit are brilliantly displayed for us in Tony Cownie’s production, first seen at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. Mrs Warren’s daughter Vivie, educated beyond her mother’s reach, lives to work and could easily be seen as a young prig. But Emma Stansfield goes no further in this direction than to tip her head back as though to suggest eyes on higher things. Her no-nonsense urgency and attractive self-possession make her an unbeatable opponent to her mother, whose own self-possession is sapped by a sentimental mother-love, itself sapped by a love for high living.

Paola Dionisotti makes this evident not only in her choice of gowns — strident scarlet, vicious purple — but in the splendid curl of the lip at the prospect of eating lettuce … she makes her defence of the life forced upon her both cogent and, as Shaw intended, almost admirable.

It is his anger that, in his words, poverty makes work hideous that drives the play and surrounds the central couple with bounders, idlers and idiots (enjoyable performers all). Strongly recommended.

 

Director Tony Cownie has fielded a strong cast. Paola Dionisotti as Mrs Warren, is a veteran actress of stage and TV. She declaims some of Shaw’s best lines on society’s hypocrisy, on self-preservation, and on the choices for women. I like the cockney twang harking back to her barmaid days. Vivie, her daughter played by Emma Stansfield, very much reflects the attitude of young women today – independent, broadminded, challenging – quite an exception for her time. Stansfield makes her thoroughly human - fearless one minute, hopelessly in love the next. A no nonsense and spirited performance. Strong women are counterbalanced by weaker and rather more unprincipled men.  Young Frank is ineffective, Sir George an absolute rogue and Rev. Gardner no credit to the cloth – all good character parts recognisable from the Victorian society of the original drama.

Neil Murray, the designer, uses colourful but simple traditional settings and costume. Bright, sharp and uncluttered it all works very well. Shaw is wordy (Murray hints at this with his backdrop of quotations), is best when nothing gets in the way of his argument.   Although not now under the eagle eye of the censor this is not one of Shaw’s more frequently performed plays.  It was very well received at the Royal Lyceum and should do equally well in Nottingham. Go and see what you think.

 

Fortunately, this co-production between the Playhouse and Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre applies a light touch to the occasionally heavy weather of Shaw’s script. What could have been dry and moralistic is here transformed into richly human drama. Paola Dionisotti brings a brassy but easily wounded amorality to Mrs Warren, and when her world begins to intrude on that of her practically minded but sheltered daughter, Vivie (Emma Stansfiled), the chemistry between the two animates Shaw’s political and economic points with a fully rounded mother/daughter relationship.

The wastrel suitor Frank (Antony Eden), wolfish capitalist Sir George Crofts (Dougal Lee), and evangelist for tolerance and the value of art Mr Praed (John Bett) also manage to pull off the challenge of supplying the playwright’s debates on money, society and morality with just the right degree of living, breathing, human form.  

 

Sure revival of a scandalous family history
A welcome revival for George Bernard Shaw’s most revivable work bodes well for the Playhouse’s partnership with the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh.

Directed with a sure touch by Tony Cownie, and equally surely acted, this handsome production gets into all the issues explored in the 1890s story of Vivie Warren, the bright, independent girl who discovers her education and position were secured with her brothel-owning mother’s immoral earnings.

The enduring questions of parent and child, pragmatism and principle, familiarity and independence, are covered in turn in a play that was effectively spiked by the Lord Chamberlain for 27 years before its first licensed public performance in 1925.

Outwardly Paola Dionisotti’s wonderfully flinty Kitty Warren is the grande (although noisily dressed) dame, but the character’s fish shop history is betrayed by coarse vowels as she tries emotional blackmail to keep her outraged daughter. In a performance of great promise, Emma Stansfield captures both the sensitivity and strength of Vivie, and Antony Eden is her equal as the boyish suitor who must remain at arm’s length.

Jeremy Lewis, Nottingham Evening Post  

 

Signalled by a backdrop of lurid tabloid headlines, the set reminds us that the play caused a huge scandal on its first performance in 1902 and remains highly-relevant for audiences today. 

At times, Shaw’s play teeters on the verge of didacticism as the characters become mouthpieces for the various sides in an argument about wealth, social inequality and moral responsibility. But the supporting cast do well to breathe humourous life into these vehicles - and Emma Stansfield portrays Vivie’s awakening from horsey girl to self-possessed woman very well indeed.

Paola Dionisotti cuts a suitably lurid swathe across the stage as the titular character: at times of crisis her squawking streetwalker origins emerge from behind a veneer of carefully-considered respectability. Her screeching self-justifications at the play’s climax manage to be repugnant and moving at the same time.

Shaw’s outrage - and wicked eye for hypocrisy - is the dynamo that powers this chess-game of dramatic oppositions - and after the complex web of relations has been set up in the first and second acts, this anger pays dividends as the characters become ensnared by complications of their own making.

…an astonishingly contemporary examination of family tensions and the morality of capital.

Tim Cunningham, Ilkeston Advertiser

 

Classic play still has relevance for today’s audience
Vivie, played with fire and passion by Emma Stansfield, discovers that her mother’s wealth, which has paid for her education, comes from prostitution.

…This is a great opportunity to see an often-mentioned but rarely-performed classic play.

 

A faithful, clear-sighted and well-acted rendition of a play that may have lost its power to scandalise yet still retains the potency of an enduring and compelling script.

These days, George Bernard Shaw’s plays often come with the tag ’old-fashioned’. On the basis of this production of Mrs Warren’s Profession, it’s easy to see why – a dialogue-heavy play that glints with wordplay and bristles with social commentary, it’s hardly the fare that a modern audience bred on musicals and melodrama is used to.

But director Tony Cownie’s decision to play it exactly how it was written, in period and without gimmick, is entirely the right one, allowing the strength of Shaw’s script and characters to shine through.

What profession?

The beauty of it, of course, is that Mrs Warren’s profession is never actually mentioned – though, nudge nudge wink wink, we all know what it is.

Much of the wit arises from the irony of the unspoken, and most of the drama ensues from her daughter Vivie learning just what that profession is. 

As Vivie, Emma Stansfield gives a lively engaging and spirited performance as a very unconventional Victorian young woman. As the emotional epicentre of the action, she is both captivating and convincing, whilst her earlier scenes in particular display a keen knack for comedy too. 

Paola Dionisotti as the eponymous Mrs Warren is a vibrant and flamboyant lead, cleverly allowing the character’s common London upbringing to come through (there’s more than a touch of the Barbara Windsor about her!).

…The rest of the small cast do not let the side down. Antony Eden’s cheeky rogue, Frank Gardner, is particularly watchable and really brings Shaw’s repartee to life.

Design is also impeccable. Buy a programme just to have a closer look at Neil Murray’s excellent costumes, perfectly evocative of the period, with Mrs Warren’s extravagantly colourful confections of feathers and lace deliberately contrasted with Vivie’s much more subdued outfits.

Enduring and compelling Overall, this is a faithful, clear-sighted and well-acted rendition of a play that may have lost its power to scandalise yet still retains the potency of an enduring and compelling script.

Rachel Read, BBC Nottingham online            

Why is it that no one understands? What is it about me, Miss Vivi Warren, that they can’t get the hang of?

            "Unconventional"? Yes, I suppose I am a little unconventional, and isn’t it just so much more interesting that way. If I was exactly what they called conventional, why, I would be dull as anything wouldn’t you say? They all seem surprised when I get them a chair, or when I claim the hard seat, because I’m a young lady and apparently that means that men are supposed to do things for me, not the other way round. I can’t abide men who think like that. Or women who think that they themselves are too fragile to do any work at all. It’s attitudes like that that prevent so many women from getting anywhere in the world.

            I like working myself. Frank can’t understand that, but then he’s never done a day’s honest work in his life. Me, I have to be doing something. Nothing would ever get done if we all just sat around or went to concerts the whole time. I shall be a keen woman of business. I can do all of the mathematics with little difficulty and I intend to work as hard as I have to to be a successful partner at Chancery Lane. There is so much satisfaction in knowing that you are doing a job well, don’t you think?

            Cambridge was of course a huge step for me. And a very successful one. If a woman is to get on in the world she might just as well have the best possible starting point. Newnham was a wonderful place and university has certainly set me up nicely for the future. The Tripos has opened all kinds of doors that women of my mother’s generation never had.

            And as for marriage, why do they all suppose that all a young lady is interested in is marrying? Whether they suggest marrying for money and position, or even for love, I am simply not interested. A husband might prevent me from working, might have all manner of silly ideas about what I should be doing. There are far more important things I wish to do with my life than marry an ageing baronet, or a young scamp. I have work to do and a business to manage. Why should I be at all inclined to marry?

            But still they don’t understand. How could I possibly want to work all the time? How could I not be considering marriage in the near future? How could I refuse my mother’s money? They simply don’t know what to do with a delightfully splendid modern young lady.