29 October 2025
This year we’ve made two visits to Shaw's Corner - the house where George Bernard Shaw lived in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire - at Easter and on the weekend of the playwright's birthday in July when we saw an open-air production of his play 'Arms and the Man' (reviewed here in August 2025. This Monday we were at the Odeon in Milton Keynes to see a NT Live recording of Dominic Cooke’s new production of ‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’ at the National Theatre in London. Shaw wrote more than 60 plays and only a handful are still regularly performed but ‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’ has struggled for performances since it was written in 1893 - not receiving its first public performance in England until 1925. This is because of its subject matter which explores the links between sex and society. The new National Theatre production stars Imelda Staunton as Mrs Warren and her real-life daughter Bessie Carter as Mrs Warren’s daughter Vivie. It’s a fascinating play. Initially the relationships between the characters feel confusingly odd, with the suggestion of something going on beneath the surface of the dialogue reminding me of the style of much more recent plays by Sam Shepard, Caryl Churchill and Edward Albee. But as the reasons for their behaviour towards each other becomes clearer it turns into a compelling series of arguments about morality, exploitation, and women’s rights which genuinely manages to make strong cases for opposing points of view. Imelda Staunton was wonderful but this was Bessie Carter’s play and she was brilliant. Our only disappointment was that this play that struggled for performances for so long hadn’t reached a larger audience: we were the only two people in the Odeon to see it.
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