MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION

Garrick Theatre

★★★★★

“A masterfully acted, visually exquisite and morally knotty production”

Dominic Cooke’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession receives a thrillingly sharp and stylish revival that balances moral complexity, aesthetic beauty, and arresting performances. This production proves Shaw can still provoke and entertain, with astonishing relevance.

The draw for many will undoubtedly be the casting of real-life mother and daughter Imelda Staunton and Bessie Carter as Mrs Warren and her on-stage offspring Vivie. Staunton commands the stage with trademark precision and emotional depth, but Carter is just as engaging, proving she’s earned her part – it’s not simply her birth-right. The generational tension between the two characters embodied as well as acted. Staunton, at just five feet tall, brims with flamboyant energy in set and costume designer Chloe Lamford’s jewel-toned Victorian taffeta gowns, while Carter, nearly a foot taller and dressed in sober, neutral and practical outfits, towers above her mother both physically and morally. Their power dynamic is as visual as it is verbal.

The set, a lush English cottage garden constructed on a large central revolve, is a visual treat. Cosmos, foxgloves, and peonies bloom in abundance, creating a dreamlike pastoral idyll that gets slowly dismantled, mirroring the erosion of Vivie’s youthful idealism and naivete as the play progresses. The contemporary lighting design (Jon Clark) casts a soft ethereal glow over the action, contrasting with the period dress and set.

Shaw’s play, written in 1893 but long banned for its subject matter, feels surprisingly fresh and funny. Themes of gender, morality, class, and capitalism ring disturbingly true even now. Vivie is the true protagonist of the play and a woman ahead of her time: Cambridge-educated, fiercely independent, contemptuous of art and romance alike, and with dreams not of marriage but of legal practice. The men around her are bumbling fools like the Reverend Samuel Gardner (Kevin Doyle), talentless-but-charming like his son, Frank (the outrageously charismatic Reuben Joseph), hopelessly romantic and captivated by beauty like Mr Praed (Sid Sagar) or quietly evil like the only true villain Sir Robert Crofts (Robert Glenister).

And what exactly is Mrs Warren’s profession? Shaw never names it outright, and the play dances delicately (though unambiguously) around the truth. When it is revealed to each character, the reactions are telling. It’s not the choices Mrs Warren once made that cause rupture, but her refusal to reject them now. Her justification is pragmatic, even persuasive and it is in the Socratic sparring matches between Staunton and Carter that the production comes alive.

Cooke and cast resist easy moralising. As Brecht once said of Shaw, he excelled in “dislocating our stock associations.” There are no heroes here, only complex individuals navigating a world with too few good options. By the end, Vivie walks away from her mother, her money, and all the compromises that come with it. Yet she doesn’t emerge triumphant. The play closes on a note of quiet devastation. Vivie may have escaped her mother’s shadow, but she remains haunted by the phantoms of the women who could not.

A masterfully acted, visually exquisite and morally knotty production.

MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION

Garrick Theatre

Reviewed on 23rd May 2025

by Amber Woodward

Photography by Johan Persson

Previously reviewed at this venue:

UNICORN | ★★★★ | February 2025

WHY AM I SO SINGLE? | ★★★★ | September 2024

BOYS FROM THE BLACKSTUFF | ★★★ | June 2024

FOR BLACK BOYS … | ★★★★ | March 2024

HAMNET | ★★★ | October 2023

THE CROWN JEWELS | ★★★ | August 2023

ORLANDO | ★★★★ | December 2022

MYRA DUBOIS: DEAD FUNNY | ★★★★ | September 2021

MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION

THE LEHMAN TRILOGY at the Gillian Lynne Theatre

★★★★★

“a towering study of human drives, frailties, venality and, yes, exuberance”

On September 15, 2008, something was stirring. I went to the window of my Canary Wharf office and peered down to see an ant trail of sacked Lehman Bros workers trooping from 25 Bank Street, carrying storage boxes full of BlackBerries, Rolodexes, picture frames and trophies.

Wall Street’s fourth largest investment bank had collapsed. The first domino had fallen. The credit crunch had arrived.

A few months later I looked out of another Docklands window to see, rather incongruously, President Barack Obama step out to join an emergency meeting of the G20 at Excel London. There, world leaders would devise a punishing solution that would bring about austerity, Brexit, and the rise of the populist right.

How did we get here? How did the bankers topple the world and walk away scot free?

Who are these people? What is their nature?

To answer that question, director Sam Mendes takes the long view and, in doing so, compiles a towering study of human drives, frailties, venality and, yes, exuberance. He also manages to capture, almost by accident, the story of money and the story of America. His touch is light and impeccable, and the results are truly astonishing.

In The Lehman Trilogy, Es Devlin’s stage design, a rotating cube, is monochromatic and stark, all glass and steel, with a screen backdrop that provides the sweeping epic with a suitable sense of cinematic grandeur.

Those bankers’ boxes too, now icons of the crisis, litter the stage, linking past and present. Boxes everywhere, stacked and restacked like a child’s toy blocks on the neatly revolving stage. Everything is kinetic, structured and measured with geometric precision.

Three actors – John Heffernan, Aaron Krohn and Howard W Overshown – initially play the Lehman brothers but eventually everyone else in this sprawling tale. They take us on a journey which starts with three penniless Jewish immigrants selling cloth in a small shop in Montgomery, Alabama in 1844, and ends in the high-rolling and blinkered C-suites of New York on that fateful September day.

From Bavaria to the boardroom, we come to understand how ambition slowly calcifies into greed which hardens further into self-serving indifference. But, remarkably, in this retelling, there is no judgement, no polemic, just acute observations of human foibles.

The three actors play the brothers and their families deftly and with relish. Heffernan is a phenomenon, a marvel, by turns twinkle-eyed and twitchy. Overshown is immense. Krohn’s succession of coquettish female suitors is a delight. For all its serious purpose, the play is a hoot.

The script, by Stefano Massini, adapted by Ben Power has a journalistic hunger for story-telling, for the engaging hook, for gossip – and generations of Lehmans offer up more than their fair share of material, surviving fire, war, technology and the Great Depression and always, always making money.

What an immense achievement.

When the story of capitalism comes to be told as history, The Lehman Trilogy may well be a defining text, capturing all the dazzling allure and catastrophic folly of that very human endeavour.

The value of stocks may rise and fall – but this production? Pure gold. Buy! Buy! Buy!

Tag Archives: Jon Clark

MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION

★★★★★

Garrick Theatre

MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION

Garrick Theatre

★★★★★

“A masterfully acted, visually exquisite and morally knotty production”