This Quentin family affair gives morality tale real life...
Mrs Warren’s Profession (Theatre Royal Bath and touring
Verdict: Mum’s the word ★★★★✩ The Sex Party
(Menier Chocolate Factory) Verdict: Limp comedy ★✩✩✩✩
BERNARD SHAW’S 1893 Mrs Warren’s Profession is a family affair — more than ever in this touring production. It stars Caroline Quentin as Kitty Warren, the madam whose successful chain of brothels has paid for the excellent education of her daughter, Vivie (played here by Caroline’s own daughter, Rose).
Vivie is now so intellectually acute and morally sharp that she condemns and disowns her mother. It’s not the sexploitation of poor women ( her mum included) that Vivie objects to, but the fact her mother continues to prosper from the business. It might be called ‘tough love’ these days. Rose’s brisk, heartless Vivie howls for barely one second when she cuts off her mother ... then immediately settles back to her actuarial calculations.
While being a chip off the old block, Vivie is more naturally classy, as well as better polished — thanks to the nannies, private schooling and Newnham College, Cambridge.
Caroline’s excellent Mrs Warren is tellingly just a touch over-rouged and there’s a ship- in- full- gale showiness in her tailored paleyellow cape with black piping.
Moreover, the genteel mask occasionally slips and she slides into a Cockney shriek.
The resemblance between them is striking — and delightful. So too is the gap in their acting experience. Rose is impressively on top of the torrent of words but frequently stresses the wrong ones. Caroline is in total command, nuanced and playful.
Still, if there is little real emotional intelligence evident in Shaw’s articulate attack on English hypocrisy, there’s plenty of moral meat to sink one’s teeth into.
Anthony Banks’s well-performed production rattles along nicely and looks terrific. The curtain rises on a rural scene, picture perfect but wildly out of proportion. The tiny thatched-roof ‘house’ is the size of a gazebo, a reflection perhaps of the way women in those days were trapped in dolls’ houses. Lovely silk underwear is hanging out to dry — which Vivie tactfully gathers when a chap arrives for tea. But it’s hard to see why the play was considered so shocking that it was banned until 1925.
Perhaps the Lord Chamberlain didn’t care for swaggering sleazeball Sir Charles Crofts, smoothly played by Simon Shepherd, who shamelessly lusts after Vivie . . . and might well be her father. Though another candidate is Matthew Cottle’s hilarious hungover vicar, and the minute lopsided church is another neat metaphor for the place of religion in society then — and now.
The play may spring from a bygone world, but it remains bracing.
THAT song You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties might have been written for Terry Johnson’s latest crude and witless play which begins — and ends — in an enviable Islington kitchen on the night that Alex (Jason Merrells) is hosting his first orgy.
First to arrive are an old flame, Gilly (Lisa Dwan), in a dress slashed to her hip and missing bits in the middle, and her husband, Jake (John Hopkins), keen to insist that they are ‘not swappers or swingers, just curious’.
Unlike Molly Osborne’s Hetty, Alex’s engaging and enthusiastic girlfriend, who is young enough to
be his daughter. ‘I just love c**ks,’ she beams, as though that is how conversations genuinely begin.
Anyone’s will do, judging from the noises emerging from the sitting room swiftly after the entrance of pony- tailed American Jeff (Timothy Hutton), his Russian wife, Magdelena (Amanda Ryan), dim, stoned Tim ( Will Barton) and his hard, bossy wife, Camilla (Kelly Price).
The spectacle of a gathering of white, middleclass and mostly middle-aged heterosexuals shedding clothing and inhib i t i o n s is as embarrassing, old- fashioned and tedious as it sounds. Nothing happens in the kitchen except bickering. Even the spillage of red wine on the Persian rug and Tim losing his trousers, having gone outdoors to smoke a joint (poking but not smoking permitted indoors), occur offstage.
Then the luscious Lucy (Pooya Mohseni) appears, perfectly poised in a slinky, strappy number.
Lucy is possibly transgender, possibly transitioning, and this already dreadful, unfunny, ugly comedy lurches into a low-grade, lowering debate about sexual identity, orientation and gender.
Offensive Republican Jeff pronounces, predictably, that ‘selfidentification poses a problem to the nuclear family’. Offensive Russian calls Lucy ‘ a homosexual with delusions of grandeur’.
Dim Tim asks if she is on the side of J. K. Rowling or Harry Potter. And there’s a fight about pronouns, before the suggestion that a tennis match between Lucy and Gilly would not be fair and someone refers to Lucy as ‘it’.
A fine, valiant cast do their utmost to flesh out the emaciated stereotypes before this flaccid piece fumbles to an unconvincing and uncomfortable end.
My advice: Be a Party pooper.