"You were taught wrong on purpose; you don't know what the world is really like."
BBC Radio 3's Drama On Three aired a stunning production last Sunday, 18 November, of George Bernard Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession; it's available for listening on-line until 2000 GMT (that's 1500 EST, I believe) this Sunday, 25 November. The production is a little under two hours long, and features the marvelous Claire Skinner (who previously played the love interest in Auntie Beeb's adaptation of Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov) as the tough-as-nails "new woman" Vivie Warren (the titular character's daughter). Apparently it was first broadcast last year.
Ostensibly a play about prostitution in the declining years of the Victorian era, Mrs Warren's Profession is more properly categorized as a play about class differences and the economic gap that goes with them, as well as the scope of action allowed to women and the signs and portents of the burgeoning women's movement that would nearly bring down the government of Prime Minister Asquith in 1910. For all that it treats with "big picture" ideas, Mrs Warren's Profession is also an intimate play, one that sounds the question "What sort of advantages may one ethically choose to go forward in life?" in a compelling manner.
The final confrontation between Vivie and her mother, in Act IV, made me stop what I was doing and sit bolt upright at my desk at the cubicle farm; here's a bit of Mrs Warren's speech, from Project Gutenberg:
"You think that people are what they pretend to be: that the way you were taught at school and college to think right and proper is the way things really are. But it's not: it's all only a pretence, to keep the cowardly slavish common run of people quiet....[Urgently] Vivie: the big people, the clever people, the managing people, all know it. They do as I do, and think what I think. I know plenty of them. I know them to speak to, to introduce you to, to make friends of for you....What do the people that taught you know about life or about people like me? When did they ever meet me, or speak to me, or let anyone tell them about me? the fools! Would they ever have done anything for you if I hadn't paid them?"
I never associated Bernard Shaw with the unofficial genre of "everything you know is wrong" (see also: Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, On the Road, johnny got his gun, Doctor Rat, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, etc.) before; but, damn.
Ostensibly a play about prostitution in the declining years of the Victorian era, Mrs Warren's Profession is more properly categorized as a play about class differences and the economic gap that goes with them, as well as the scope of action allowed to women and the signs and portents of the burgeoning women's movement that would nearly bring down the government of Prime Minister Asquith in 1910. For all that it treats with "big picture" ideas, Mrs Warren's Profession is also an intimate play, one that sounds the question "What sort of advantages may one ethically choose to go forward in life?" in a compelling manner.
The final confrontation between Vivie and her mother, in Act IV, made me stop what I was doing and sit bolt upright at my desk at the cubicle farm; here's a bit of Mrs Warren's speech, from Project Gutenberg:
"You think that people are what they pretend to be: that the way you were taught at school and college to think right and proper is the way things really are. But it's not: it's all only a pretence, to keep the cowardly slavish common run of people quiet....[Urgently] Vivie: the big people, the clever people, the managing people, all know it. They do as I do, and think what I think. I know plenty of them. I know them to speak to, to introduce you to, to make friends of for you....What do the people that taught you know about life or about people like me? When did they ever meet me, or speak to me, or let anyone tell them about me? the fools! Would they ever have done anything for you if I hadn't paid them?"
I never associated Bernard Shaw with the unofficial genre of "everything you know is wrong" (see also: Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, On the Road, johnny got his gun, Doctor Rat, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, etc.) before; but, damn.