'Mrs Warren's Profession' at The Comedy Theatre

This evening we went to see 'Mrs Warren's Profession' at the Comedy Theatre off Leicester Square, an old theatre with the stage and stalls so far underground that you could hear the tube trains rattling in the depths. The audience was also rather old and deeply home counties. But that's ok because Felicity Kendal was the star of the show. I've been a fan of Felicity since I fell in love with her as Barbara Good in 'The Good Life' oh so many decades ago.

I'm not a big Shaw fan and his plays always feel very wordy - why use 10 words if 20 will make it longer? It's the tale of Mrs Warren who is a rich madam with 'hotels' dotted around Europe and her Cambridge-educated daughter who has no idea what her mother does or where the money comes from. Until, that is, the mother comes clean about her past, her humble origins and how she and her sister used their charms to build a business. What she doesn't explain is that the business is still thriving and that's what causes a rift between mother and daughter, with the daughter heading off to London to make her own way in the world. There's a love interest (of course) and other characters, but that's the nub of the story. The play is about money and capitalism, about society's double-standards, about the rotten core of the upper classes, about dignity and morality. Oh, it's about lots of things.

The cast was excellent - they've been on tour so are well rehearsed and knit together well. The leading roles are Felicity as Mrs Warren and Lucy Briggs-Owen as her daughter, played with a rather brittle exterior that doesn't let you see the churning emotion beneath. It was great to finally see Felicity on stage and she played the part with a mix of knowing cocquettishness and middle aged world weariness - until the final scene when she announced she couldn't give up her job since she craved the excitement of it, and that summed up her character and explains the flashes of anger or annoyance she displays at various points during the play.

Some of the twists and turns of the plotting were a bit obvious but, then again, the play has probably been plagiarised quite a bit over the years so I can forgive that. It was also a brave attempt at the time at an early feminist tract - how else could a woman make money except by selling her body? I'm sure there were lots of other ways, but this is the obvious (and most theatrical) one.

I enjoyed it and wished we'd been closer to the stage. The staging was a bit awkward with long lulls between acts (which seemed odd since the changes to the set weren't that drastic) but that's ok. Most thing are ok when you know you're going to see Felicity. She did good swish of her floor length skirts (knocking over a chair at one point - now, that's good swish!), much better than the men in the mandatory late-Victorian linen suits.