Ages ago I booked tickets to see a live streaming of George Bernard Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession - at Fellini's in Ambleside. It's so great to be able to see National Theatre productions in a local venue.
So, after glorious weather yesterday, today we were quite glad to have an indoor activity planned, as it is has been raining solidly all afternoon. Fellini's felt like the perfect place to be.
Mrs Warren's Profession is one of Shaw's most famous problem plays which challenges social norms and moral assumptions rather than simply entertaining. When first produced the play was banned by the Lord Chamberlain's Office for its immoral subject matter. Today it is recognised as a landmark in feminist and social realist theatre for its frank treatment of prostitution and Victorian moral hypocrisy.
Imelda Staunton and her real life daughter, Bessie Carter play the eponymous Mrs Warren and her daughter Vivie. They were absolutely believable in their respective roles: the madame and her blue-stocking daughter.
The Guardian's reviews sums up the play very well "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."
I thoroughly enjoyed the production. There was a touch of both King Lear and Oscar Wilde in the play and I felt that the producer and the cast struck just the right note of pathos, despair and humour.