TT: Un-Shaw of themselves

I review the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway revival of Mrs. Warren’s Profession in the Greater New York section of today’s Wall Street Journal. It isn’t very good. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Nobody ever says the word “prostitution” out loud in George Bernard Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” even though the oldest profession is what it’s all about. Small wonder: The play was written in 1894, but nobody dared to perform it on stage until 1902, Victorian prudery being what it was, and it has only been in recent years that “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” has been seen at all regularly in this country. Nowadays, though, interest in Shaw’s early work is on the upswing, and the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway revival is the play’s third major American mounting so far this year (it was previously presented by California Shakespeare Theater and the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D.C.). Could it be that the once-scandalous, now-titillating subject matter of “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” makes it more attractive to modern audiences? I wouldn’t be surprised–but I’m sorry to say that the Roundabout’s erratic version has little else to offer.
On paper, the Roundabout’s “Mrs. Warren” looked like a sure thing. Cherry Jones, who is as accomplished a stage actor as we have today, plays the unapologetically vulgar madam whose “private hotels” are sufficiently profitable to allow her to buy Vivie (Sally Hawkins), her brainy daughter, a place in respectable English society. The staging is by Doug Hughes, who directed Ms. Jones in “Doubt,” and the sets are by Scott Pask, whose list of noteworthy design credits is several feet long. In addition to Ms. Jones, the cast includes such familiar faces as Mark Harelik, Edward Hibbert and Michael Siberry.
So what went wrong? Pretty much everything, though by far the worst offender is Ms. Hawkins, a British film and TV actor of some note whose performance as Vivie couldn’t be further off the mark. Shaw’s stage directions describe Vivie as the quintessential example of “the sensible, able, highly-educated young middle-class Englishwoman….strong, confident, self-possessed.” For Ms. Hawkins to play her as a squeaky, flighty semi-tomboy is thus nonsensical, and the fact that she swallows at least half of her lines renders large chunks of the play all but unintelligible….
* * *
The print version of the Journal‘s Greater New York section only appears in copies of the paper published in the New York area, but the complete contents of the section are available on line, and you can read my review of Mrs. Warren’s Profession by going here.