Berkshires arts reviews

August 22, 2007 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Three years ago I made the long trek to Canada to see if the Shaw Festival was as magnificent as everybody said it was. It was. (See Ms. Hall’s reviews of Man and Superman and Pygmalion at Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lakes, Ontario.)

Last night at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, I saw a production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” that out-shawed Shaw, and I only had to travel a few miles down Route 7 to get there!

Mrs. Warren is not an easy play; Shaw called it an unpleasant one, and when he wrote it in 1893, he couldn’t get it produced in England until 1925. (America was braver and gave it its first production in 1905 although it was soon closed for indecency.)

It is a dynamic, wrenching play, almost painful in its intensity, and that intrepid director Anders Cato, backed by Kate McGuire and Eric Hill (who have not been afraid to offer Strindberg!!! to summer matinees and believe in theatre with a capital ‘T’) have brought two of the finest actors available to play its two combative female leads and given them a strong supporting cast of four male actors.

Mrs. Warren’s profession was prostitution—one of the few ways a penniless Victorian woman could earn a living. She was an uneducated vulgarian but she had dreams of a better life for her daughter Vivie whom she left to be educated as a lady in England, including a degree from Cambridge, while she, Kitty W., amassed a fortune as Madame of a “guest house” in Brussels that became part of a syndicate in other European capitals.

As the play opens Mrs. W has come back to England to get to know her daughter. Their contrasting values are played out in electrically charged scenes between the two women, interwoven with scenes in which the four men in the play, in lesser but significant roles, appear.

As Kitty Warren, Lisa Barnes is riveting in a role that unskillfully handled could be melodramatic but as played never is. In her first confrontation with her daughter she skillfully evokes the girl’s compassion and sympathy even sobbing and falling to her knees in self pity. But forgiven, having not told ALL, she is soon her confident, elegantly regal self, parading with her parasol and flirting with her daughter’s young admirer. And in the final scene, when Vivie knows the whole story and defies her mother, Kitty now in wrath refuses the final hand-shake and slams out of her daughter’s life to continue her career in Brussels.

Xanthe Elbrick as Vivie is complex character demanding change and development as the play progresses. She is the most sympathetic character in a play that has few. We first see her, glad her boring education in math (which won her a Third Wrangler placing and a fifty pound bet) is behind her and she can work in a friend’s law office and acquire the skills to become a lawyer.

She scarcely knows her mother, is temporarily moved by her mother’s half-confession, and she is, until she finds out more, compassionate, warm and protective of Kitty. Once she is made aware of the source of the money that has raised her, she is hardened to disgust, appalled by the idea that not only will her mother not tell her who her father is, but that it is quite possible her mother does not even know.

She quickly sheds any ideas of any relationship with Frank, who may be her half-brother, but who probably is not, and in the last scene with her mother in the London office, she stoically rejects not only her mother but also Frank (and probably all men) to go on with her own life on her own terms. A bravara performance. The scenes between the two women are dynamic.

The four men in the supporting cast are each carefully etched characters, thoroughly convincing and well played.

Frank, (Randy Harrison) the youngest of the quartet is charming, ardent, fickle, an amiable weakling, supportive of Vinie and loving her, but practical enough to know without her mother’s money to back them marrying her would never work because he is well aware he is incapable of earning any. A well-defined character, and one distinctively different from those leads he has played with skill in “Equus” and “Amadeus.”

Stephen Temperley as Reverend Gardner, is a dolt who obviously has a Church of England sinecure through family connections. ( Frank, with all his faults, is too good to be his son.) He plays his worry over old love letters that Mrs. Warren still possesses to the hilt, and even worries over Vinie’s paternity, although he need not since he never possessed genes half good enough to lend to anyone. Hearing him babble one is amazed at how well Frank, for all his limitations, has turned out; the off-stage mother, who suddenly invented a quick trip to London when her stupid husband brought unsavory guests into the house probably had a lot to do with it.

The most unsavory guest, and most unsympathetic character in the play is Sir George Crofts, played brilliantly by Walter Hudson. He is a scoundrel from the moment we see him, has backed and still does, Kitty Warren’s brothels, feels it possible he could be Vinie’s father, but not by that deterred from wanting to marry her and keep the whole business in the family.

Mark Nelson as Praed, family friend, well aware of Kitty Warren’s profession, not involved with it, but not shocked until he realizes the daughter knows nothing of it, is convincingly played. He is sympathetic to Vinie’s plight, but too self-involved as architect and interested in the arts to become involved.

Since in Shaw’s day playwrights thought nothing of asking for four different sets for a four act play, today’s stage designers have a challenge. Carl Sprague has solved it delightfully with mimalistic exterior-interior rotating scenery in which doors become other doors. Ingenious. And the scene shifts are choreographed, almost dances, accompanied by loud, discordant music while the six women (and it is important that they are women, char-women of Victorian England) change things about. This accompanied by some skillful lighting by Dan Kotlowitz.

Olivera Galic’s costumes are divinely Shavian, especially those worn by Kitty and by young Frank.

A brief review can only touch on some of the delights of this production. And although Shaw may lump it with unpleasant, it, skillfully played as it is in this production, raises unpleasant truths still very much with us today. As Kitty reminds her daughter at one point “It’s not work any woman would do for pleasure, goodness knows; though to hear pious people talk you would suppose it a bed of roses.”

Shaw, that old Socialist, was arguing for social and economic changes; our world could still use a few.

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