A witty look at the oldest profession

Catherine Phillips

04 December 2009

FELICITY Kendal stars in the title role of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession at Festival Theatre, Malvern from Monday, December 7 before the play transfers to the West End.
Mrs Warren’s daughter, Vivie, has never really known much about her mother.
A prim young woman, she has enjoyed a comfortable upbringing, a Cambridge education, a generous monthly allowance and now has ambitions to go into the law.
Is it conceivable that all this privilege and respectability has been financed from the proceeds of the oldest profession?
How will Vivie react when she finds out the awful truth about her mother’s ill-gotten gains?
Shaw’s ultimate test of a mother-daughter relationship is one of his most witty and provocative plays.
Written in 1894 but banned from performance until the racy 1920s, Mrs Warren’s Profession lays bare the rampant hypocrisy of Victorian society and its constrained morals.
Felicity Kendal is much loved for her illustrious television and stage career.
She has starred in many long-running television series including The Good Life, Solo, The Mistress and Rosemary and Thyme.
Her extensive theatre credits range from Humble Boy, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus and Desdemona in Othello, to Tom Stoppard’s On The Razzle and Arcadia.
She was most recently seen in Simon Gray’s The Last Cigarette directed by Richard Eyre.
David Yelland plays the role of Sir George Crofts.
His numerous diverse roles for film and television include Edward VIII in Chariots of Fire, Nick Rumpole in Rumpole of the Bailey, Edwin in The Bretts, and the title role in David Copperfield.
Most recently, he has appeared on our screens in Waking the Dead, The Line of Beauty, Midsomer Murders, Spooks, the US hit series Bones and Agatha Christie: Poirot.
On stage, he has worked extensively with the National Theatre, the Chichester Festival Theatre, The Peter Hall Company and in the West End.
Dramatist, literary critic and socialist spokesman, Bernard Shaw was also a freethinker, a supporter of women’s rights and an advocate of equality of income. His extensive literary output also includes Pygmalion, Arms and the Man, Candida, Man and Superman, The Apple Cart, Heartbreak House and Saint Joan, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.
Mrs Warren’s Profession is at Malvern Theatres until Saturday, December 12.
Tickets cost from £20.50 to £28.50 (under 26s £8) and are available on 01684 892277 or at malvern-theatres.co.uk.

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