George Bernard Shaw’s provocative play Mrs Warren’s Profession examines the moral hypocrisy of the moneyed classes. It opens with a brilliant young graduate, Vivie Warren, boasting about her dazzling achievements as a mathematician at Newnham College, Cambridge. She explains her future plans to a pair of mild-mannered chaps who clearly adore her. Like most of Shaw’s characters, Vivie is hard-nosed, emotionally cold, incapable of speaking concisely and boundlessly self-confident. Quite irritating, in other words. She plans to start a firm with another hyper-brainy female and to make a killing in the London insurance market. This occurs in 1902. Was it normal for two unmarried Edwardian women to enter the world of high finance straight out of university? Hard to say. But for Shaw it seems feasible, so we accept it.
However, Vivie’s life is about to be thrown into disarray. Enter Mrs Warren, her redoubtable mother, played by Imelda Staunton. Kitty Warren speaks and thinks exactly like her daughter but she affects a more luxurious personal style. Her ash-blonde hair is piled high on her head and she’s magnificently robed in a costly ball gown accented with necklaces and other pieces of finery. She looks like the tsarina being led to her execution by the Bolsheviks. But her accent carries inflections of a rough past.
We learn that Kitty rose from the gutter to become a wealthy businesswoman and the details of her past are slowly revealed during Act One. She began as a barmaid at Waterloo Station where she earned four shillings (£20 today) a week. Then she was spotted by a female relative who worked as a courtesan and recruited Kitty to the business.
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