Directed by Patrick Mason
Costume and set design by Francis O'Connor
Mrs. Warren’s Profession is a play that I know very well but
had never seen before. I’ve studied
it. I’ve written papers on it. I’ve taught it. I was very excited to finally get to see
it. Shaw’s 1893 play skewering the
social and economic institutions that necessitate and profit from the
exploitation of women in the sex trade is an extremely sharp script, and it
really doesn’t pull its punches. It’s
funny and dramatic, balancing witty entertainment with very clear and challenging
didacticism. That’s really one of the
amazing things about Bernard Shaw. It’s
never a question of trying to balance art and political speech with him, they’re
one and the same. His plays are funny,
dramatic, intensely political, educational arguments that are highly
entertaining and engaging. They, provoke
you to think, challenging you to
examine the basis of society while making you laugh. I had a very strong mental image of some of
the characters, and of the setting going in.
The difference between my interpretation and the director’s was jarring.
I found myself strongly disagreeing with
some of the directorial decisions and the production design in particular.
On to the good points: the acting was excellent. Some of the characters weren’t how I expected
them to be (huzzah for differing directorial interpretations), but it generally
worked very well. Sara O’Mara’s Vivie I found intensely grating
at first. I never saw as many false
smiles in my head, and her voice at the beginning drove me up the wall. But,
the interpretation of the character really grew on me. Vivie’s voice and mannerisms developed
throughout the play in a way that added depth.
Sorcha Cusak’s Kitty Warren was pitch perfect, complex, layered, and
provocative. However, at the end of it,
Vivie’s scathing judgment of her as a “conventional” woman seemed an accurate
assessment. The scenes between mother
and daughter were exceptionally strong. The Frank in my head has always been
more innocently feckless, while Tadhg Murphy’s Frank was much more sleazy and
self-aware. It did work, but Vivie and
Frank didn’t have much chemistry and I couldn’t really see why either the Vivie
in my head or the Vivie on stage would be at all attracted to the Frank on
stage. David Yelland’s Sir George Crofts was delightfully dislikeable, and
Philip Judge’s Praed was wonderfully sympathetic throughout.
The costumes were lovely, and Francis O’Connor must have had
fun with the millinery. Kitty Warren’s
hats were brilliant, amusing, and oh so in character.
And now on to my complaint: The director (Patrick Mason) and set designer
(again Francis O’Connor, whose set design for My Cousin Rachel was stunning) appear to have thought Shaw’s
message wasn’t clear enough, that his didactic drama needed to be supplemented
with self-aware distancing effect to constantly remind the audience that this
is a play with a Political Message, and that that Message is About Prostitution,
and This Is Still Relevant. And in
trying to make sure The Message was clear to the audience, I think they blunted
its sharpness of Shaw’s script and kind of missed the point.
My biggest disagreements were with two things in particular: the set design and the addition of voiceovers
of “The Voice of Bernard Shaw” reading excerpts of his essay (a preface to a
later edition of the play text) about the play’s reception, which accuses the
censors and the theatrical establishment in general of being complicit with the
same immoral institution that Shaw exposes in the play.
The set was a high concept set – drab industrial greys, bare
boards, and a Statement of a backdrop: a collage of photographs of female sex
workers from various eras, in various states of dress/undress reminding the
audience constantly of the two unspeakable words in the play: “fallen woman”, in case you had somehow
forgotten that the major tension in the plot arises from Vivie’s discovery that
her mother’s fortune – and all the money supporting her own education and
status – first from prostitution and then as the manager of several *ahem* “private
hotels” on the continent. The thing is,
and the thing I believe this production missed, is that prostitution is really
the minor point of the play. Shaw uses
it (as he uses weapons manufacturing in Major Barbara) to point up what he
believes is the truly immoral societal institution that prostitution is only a
symptom of. Prostitution is the least
immoral thing in the play. Rather, the
true immorality is in the system that profits from the exploitaton of others. This was also a problem with the drab
industrial greyness. See, the majority
of the play is set in the English countryside.
And you need the idyllic pastoral location as a visual contrast to point
out exactly how deeply the rot of exploitation and hypocrisy is spread. It’s not just the urban scene of the women in
lead factories and brothels that depends on the exploitation of the poor (and
poor women in particular), it’s the country house with a garden full of
flowers, the picturesque village rectory, the institutions of church and
nobility that profit from and thrive on the exploitation of women.
Downstage-left was a old-fashioned speaker, which got
highlighted between scenes as extracts from Shaw’s essay were read in voiceover
between scenes (like, as my sister in law mentioned, a director’s explanatory
commentary on a DVD extra). The effect
was a pseudo-Brechtian attempt to drive the message home, and it was frankly
too much. The play does stand on its
own. Supplementary contextualization and
argument are great, but they don’t belong in the middle of the play. And Shaw doesn’t work like Brecht. I’m aware that, having studied this play and
written papers on “Shaw and the Woman Question”, having read the essay
excerpted in voiceovers between scenes, I’m likely a good bit more knowledgeable
about the context and politics of the play than the majority of the audience,
but I think it makes its point clearly enough without the extra background. Frankly, I felt like the director /production
designers didn’t trust Shaw to be able to make his own argument. And if you can’t trust the brilliantly
cantankerous GBS to make an argument, you’ve got a problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment