Tart without the heart

We still recoil from the idea of licensing brothels and regard prostitution as an undesirable trade. So there remains a frisson of daring about Bernard Shaw's subversive, satirical comedy on the subject. And Peter Hall's Edwardian production underlines the play's enduring relevance.

Shaw famously argued that underpaid women who became prostitutes did so in financial desperation and that poverty was infinitely worse than selling your body. The play was accordingly banned under Britain's stage censorship regulations from 1893 until 1925. Even today, the likes of wealthy Mrs Warren, with her network of brothels abroad, would surely be spurned - even if offering party political funds.

Sadly, a crucial point is suppressed in Sir Peter's enjoyable, comically buoyant interpretation. Men who exploit women are admittedly satirised here, with particular vigour by Richard Johnson as a dirty, old baronet. But Sir Peter allows Brenda Blethyn to burlesque aspects of Mrs Warren, whose graduate daughter, Rebecca Hall's frigid, severe Vivie, severs ties with mother after discovering her parent continues in the brothel business.

The great, climactic scene when Vivie rejects her mother and the money Mrs Warren wants to settle on her ought to be animated by anger and despair. A wretched family tragedy unfolds. Mrs Warren has fought to give her daughter everything she lacked. But since Vivie has become a rigid upholder of conventional values, she lacks the humanity to acknowledge her mother's sacrifice. Miss Blethyn, all dolled up in red, with her voice expertly slipping down the social scale under stress, is a comic pleasure as Mrs Warren, who cannot quite keep commonness at bay. But she wrongly reduces Mrs Warren to a comically insincere old moaner and wailer, self-pitying rather than impassioned.

The scenes leading to this resolution are better judged. The production looks alarmingly cheap, with John Gunter's inadequate stage designs confined to small photo-montages of rural Surrey and odd pieces of furniture, laboriously moved between scenes, that stand in a void. But the very inexperienced Rebecca Hall convincingly conveys Vivie's brisk, almost masculine cool and self-possession, with mother and men alike. When not speaking, however, she appears oddly detached, bored rather than reactive. She's at her best up against Richard Johnson's dyspeptic, delightful Sir George, a vintage curmudgeon who's all swank and swagger as he tries to woo Vivie.

The lanky Laurence Fox, oddly camp as the vicar's caddish son and irritatingly sibilant, too, suggests the heirs of Sir George's generation will be as deceitful and smarter. And Peter Blythe, who clearly doesn't know Victorian men always doffed their hats to ladies, represents the effete male aesthete in the midst of this magnificent assault upon male power and British hypocrisy.