Mark Haddon is rather making a habit of writing about mental-health issues. His novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was about a boy with Asperger’s and his TV drama Coming Down the Mountain had a character with Down’s syndrome. He charts similar territory with Polar Bears, which also features a character with a mental-health disorder.
theatre reviews
Matt Wolf
One of the stranger facts of the theatre in recent years is the comparatively short shrift given to Alan Ayckbourn, who was once a seasonal mainstay. The upside of that same lessening of productions is that those Ayckbourn outings that do come along have for the most part been wonderfully welcome. Topping that list, and how, was the Old Vic's glorious revival of The Norman Conquests, which went on to triumph critically on Broadway, a street not always susceptible to this writer's ways.
Veronica Lee
George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play was deemed too scandalous for public performance in Britain and was banned by the Lord Chamberlain until 1925, and its New York premiere in 1905 caused such outrage that the cast were arrested. Its offence was that Shaw was writing about the world’s oldest profession, prostitution, and alluded to a possible incestuous coupling. His greatest crime, though, was the play’s attack on Victorian hypocrisy.
For prostitution, of course, could not exist with what we now would call a solid customer base, and it was a profession allowed to flourish with the collusion of the Victorian establishment, some of whom were its most enthusiastic customers. And Shaw was also attacking capitalism's part in the sex trade; in the play’s preface he wrote that prostitution was caused: “... by underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together.”
The last sentence, sadly, could have been written last week and Mrs Warren’s Profession has so many other modern parallels - a fractured mother-daughter relationship, women being treated as mere playthings, among them - that it’s ripe for a revival, here in a Theatre Royal Bath production, directed by Michael Rudman.
As the play begins we see Mrs Warren’s daughter, Vivie (whose father is unknown), awaiting her homecoming with one of her mother’s many male friends, the artist Mr Praed; when she arrives, we realise mother and daughter are not close. Vivie has recently had the benefit of a Cambridge education (but no degree - this is some time before women were allowed to matriculate) and lives on a comfortable allowance, both paid for by her mother’s lucrative brothels on the Continent, of which she knows nothing. Shaw, for all he was a proto-feminist, draws Vivie rather coarsely; she has no truck with art or love and she describes her lifestyle as “work followed by a comfortable chair, a cigar and a whisky”.
Others gathered for the party are Sir George Crofts, a middle-aged bachelor who, we learn, lent Mrs Warren a large sum to establish her upmarket whorehouses (with a handsome 35 per cent annual return), the local vicar Mr Gardner, who has “a past” with Mrs Warren, and his handsome but feckless son Frank, who is swooningly in love with Vivie.
Mrs Warren (Felicity Kendal) decides to tell Vivie (Lucy Briggs-Owen) where her wealth comes from. At first this emancipated young woman is sympathetic, angry that her mother had to choose between an early death like her sister’s in a lead factory, or selling her body. But when she realises that the business still exists she becomes instantly judgmental and rejects her mother. Over the course of the evening both Frank and Crofts propose marriage to Vivie, but she rebuffs them - she would rather be alone than have a fool for a husband, or enter into matrimony with the cold-hearted Crofts, who presents the marriage contract as the same as that between a whore and her customer, but as more socially acceptable. He’s a charmer, no mistakin’.
The heart of the play is the fourth-act attempt at a rapprochement between Vivie and Mrs Warren, in which Shaw’s arguments are lucidly put as the mother seeks to justify her job and the daughter takes the high moral ground. Briggs-Owen (whose face could perhaps be a little less expressive at times) shows real spark in her exchanges with Kendal, who moves chillingly between guilt and rage as we realise the two women are equally stubborn in their refusal to compromise. In the end, Vivie rejects her mother and her would-be suitors and decides to make her own, independent - and highly moral - way through life.
Solid support for the two women comes from Mark Tandy as Praed and Eric Carte as Rev Gardner, while David Yelland’s Crofts grows more vile by each scene. The production’s highlight is Max Bennett as Frank, who shows a real gift for comedy.
I wish I could say I enjoyed this more than I did. Mrs Warren’s Profession is Shaw’s least didactic play and has plenty of sharp lines to keep one amused, the cast play their parts nicely and Paul Farnsworth’s sets look rather lovely. But it adds up to less than the sum of its parts, mostly because the direction is so plodding - there’s an awful lot of declaiming lines sitting down - and it can’t quite make up its mind whether it is Victorian melodrama, Chekhovian tragedy or Wildean comedy
OVERLEAF: MORE GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ON THEARTSDESK
aleks.sierz
Sarah Kane’s last play is the stuff of legend. Since its first production some 18 months after her suicide in 1999, it’s become a favourite with black-attired drama students, nostalgic in-yer-face drama buffs and mainstream theatres all over mainland Europe. But it is rarely performed in big spaces in this country – apparently because artistic directors feel it would empty their venues. So this version, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna of Poland’s TR Warszawa on the Barbican's main stage, is a good chance to see what we’ve been missing. Or is it?
Veronica Lee
It takes a particular talent to poke fun at the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, a conflict that cost millions of lives and led to one of the most brutal regimes in modern history. But Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, which he later turned into a play and is presented at the Lyttelton Theatre in a new version by Andrew Upton, does just that. It’s a big, rambling, sometimes confusing affair that dips into farce, but one that remains entirely gripping throughout its two hours and 40 minutes.
william.ward
Why is it that Method-ist actors are pretty much expected to spend months manically researching the inner minutiae of their character, but a much-lauded playwright can get away without providing any serious insights into his main subject matter?
aleks.sierz
One of the most common genres of contemporary Brit drama is the "me and my mates" play – usually stories about flatsharing twentysomethings. Although, over the past decade, this type of drama has been somewhat overtaken by the return of the family play, you can still spot the genre in new writing venues all over the country. So Penelope Skinner’s new 90-minute piece, which opened last night at the Bush Theatre, is – despite its evocative name (which means the colour seen by the eye in perfect darkness) – at first sight as familiar as an old sofa.
aleks.sierz
It's common to feel a real sense of doom when you approach the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre. But it’s not the dodgy hoodies that turn your legs to jelly, it’s the sheer ugliness of the architecture. Yes, aesthetically, this is urban hell. But it’s also the site of the Royal Court’s Local project, in which a rundown shop unit has been turned into a makeshift theatre. Random, a spirited revival of Debbie Tucker Green’s 2008 play, is the first of a season of edgy dramas to make the trek from Sloane Square to Southwark.
Veronica Lee
For the life of me I cannot understand why London Assurance is not performed more often. It’s a rollicking comedy, written in 1841 but which has a Restoration heart, with a cast list that includes a wideboy named Dazzle, a valet Cool, a servant Pert, a lawyer Meddle and - hold your sides - a horsey broad brandishing a whip named Lady Gay Spanker. Calm down, now.
Matt Wolf
In movies and on TV we expect sequels and spin-offs and the perpetuation of a franchise whereby we follow Rocky, The Terminator, or whomever seemingly to the grave. But theatre has tended to take the high road: Chekhov never revealed whether the three sisters actually reached Moscow. (What do you think?) And the nearest Beckett got to Waiting For Godot 2 are Hamm and Clov in Endgame, who can be seen as Didi and Gogo filtered through an even bleaker end of the existential prism.