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This is not the first production of George Bernard Shaw’s once-banned 1893 play about a mother-daughter reckoning to cast a real-life mother and daughter. Caroline and Rose Quentin performed it together at Theatre Royal Bath in 2022. Imelda Staunton and Bessie Carter here make a more compelling double act and bring an added frisson to the play’s intimacies and disputes.
Carter plays Vivie, a no-nonsense young woman with ambitions to take up the legal profession. Her mother, Kitty (Staunton), has a successful profession of her own – the world’s oldest – and a string of brothels to her name. When Kitty visits Vivie, who has just graduated from Cambridge, this secret is explosively revealed.
You can see why it was originally banned by the Lord Chamberlain. If Victorians were shocked by the theme of sex work, its ideological grenades about the corruptions of capitalism and establishment hypocrisies still resonate today. Some go off in director Dominic Cooke’s period-dress production, which he has edited for sleekness.
It feels abidingly faithful but moves stiffly at times, carrying the sense of a dusted down drama despite Chloe Lamford’s shining set, an island of flora and fauna bobbing like an eternally fragrant English garden against a bare black backdrop, before being stripped of its naturalism. The period dress strangely mutes the play’s shocks while, in an awkward touch, lugubrious ghostly figures in undergarments (Victorian sex workers?) crowd around the edges and act as stagehands.
It is never staid when Staunton is on stage, though. Both mother and daughter give dignified performances, Staunton the more subtle and formidable with an edge of the dandy while Vivie is plainer and more upright. The play flares fully to life in their duologues but the scenes around them feel filled with extraneous, thinly drawn characters and plot. Mr Praed (Sid Sagar) seems redundant to the drama as a whole while the reverend’s self-serving son, Frank (Reuben Joseph), sounds like a pale imitation of Oscar Wilde’s shallow men.
Sir George Crofts (Robert Glenister, excellent) appears every bit the arrogant “capitalist bully” that Vivie accuses him of being, although his defence implicates society and Vivie’s privilege too, while the Reverend (Kevin Doyle) is fabulously performed, bumbling, comic and venal.
This is, in large part, a static play of ideas, but the arguments are nuanced. Sex work is not an immoral act in itself but symptomatic of the exploitation of – and limits put upon – working women, it is suggested. Capitalism, high society and the church are implicated, and damned.
The script’s intellectual restlessness is still enlivening too; the mother-daughter battles are excellent, twisting and switching our sympathies. Kitty, by turns, seems selfish and honest, Vivie puritanical and moral. Generation and class clashes are also at play alongside existential guilt and rebellion, as well as reflections on mothers and daughters’ rights over and responsibilities to each other. Shaw shows himself to be well ahead of his time in capturing all of this and his arguments still hold a grip, even if it comes off like a Wilde play without the jokes.
