Cast

Synopsis

Vivie Warren is a stylish and self-possessed young lady who has been to both boarding school and university – but where did her mother find the money to pay for her education? This play was written in 1894 and banned from the stage as ‘immoral and otherwise improper’ attacking as it did a society which rewards vice and oppresses virtue.

Directors Notes

So run three of the verses of a poem by Thomas Hardy, a near contempory of Shaw’s, and Mrs. Warren might well have sung them herself. It is less certain that she would have been joined by her daughter Vivie, an idealistic Cambridge Law graduate happily unaware at the outset of the play of her mother’s line of work.

As Shaw in his dialogue exposes the prostitution and hypocrisy of his day he makes them also the dramatic source of Vivie’s dilemma. What is her future to be? Acceptance of current values? Love? Work? Her realisation of what each may offer her and her choice are what this play ‘unpleasant’ is about, and although Shaw makes clear his own attitude to the social values prevalent in the late Victorian Age, the rightness of the decisions made, to our seemingly more enlightened thinking, belongs to you this evening.