The annual Everyman in-house production has become an event to look forward to. They are the responsibly of the theatre’s Creative Director Paul Milton. Over a coffee in the Everyman café  I asked him to tell me about this year’s production.

‘This is the fourth in house production in the main house.’ Paul told me. ‘We did THE GLASS MENAGERIE then CIDER WITH ROSIE and last year we did WILL HARVEY’S WAR which involved a lot of local amateurs. This year we are going back to a fully professional show with MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION.’

I suggested that these shows have become an important date in the theatre’s programme. Paul agreed, ‘Absolutely. It is now our policy to do one major in-house production each year. It’s part of our remit with the Arts Council that we should do so. It is Geoffrey Rowe’s [the Everyman CEO] idea, as well as my own, that we want to keep alive that great back catalogue of classic British plays. MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION is one of those great plays which if you don’t bring it out and show it occasionally, will get lost. There’s a bit of a Shaw revival at the moment, MRS WARREN was done a couple of years ago with Felicity Kendal and they are doing MAN AND SUPERMAN at the National. In fact we thought there must be some sort of anniversary but we checked and there isn’t.’

It’s zeitgeist I suppose. But Shaw is such a great writer; they are important plays with a conscience and an axe to grind. And, as Paul pointed out, they were very much of their time. ‘All his plays are plays that couldn’t possible written now. They were all written at least a hundred years ago and the subject matter and even some of the turns of speech are so much of their time.’ And the class structure is always very prevalent I pointed out. ‘That’s right. Always with plays like this we discuss whether it should be updated. With this production the discussion lasted two minutes because it couldn’t possibly work. It’s about the empowerment of women, the fact that a woman couldn’t have a career. It was written in 1893 but was banned for twenty years.

‘If you did that play nowadays and say it’s a play about a woman who has made a living from running a string of brothels, the reaction would be “well done” but in 1893 it couldn’t be contemplated, let alone accepted. To update it just wouldn’t mean anything. So the way we are setting it will feel Victorian. It starts off with everyone looking very respectable but then you discover there is hypocrisy and squalor all over the place and that’s the joy of it.

It will start looking like a Victorian picture postcard where everything is rosy in the garden lots of pinks, lots of ambers, it will be perfect. But as the play goes on and all the cracks in the relationships start to show we lose all the colour from the set so in the end there is very little left in the way of colour on the stage.’

I would not have thought that MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION was a guaranteed crowd puller. I asked Paul if there wasn’t an element of risk involved. ‘There is,’ he replied. ‘but we wanted to do a Shaw. We investigated all his plays and we decided this was one of the most accessible in terms of the text and story and it’s quite short. The popular Shaws, things like PYGMALION, have huge casts which we couldn’t afford. And then they need big sets and lots of costumes, very expensive productions. MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION is just set in two gardens so it will be a composite set, just one set where you just move things in and out. Admittedly it’s a story that isn’t that well known but strangely everyone knows the title of the play. When I told people we were doing it they would think they knew it and thought there had been a film but the penny dropped and they realised they didn’t know much about it, except the title.’

But surely the title is fairly self-explanatory; everybody instinctively knows what it means. ‘Exactly. Shaw is such a great writer that the word is never used at all in the play. The word of what her profession is, is never said.’ Paul explained. ‘But there are so many hints that you know in the first ten minutes what they are talking about. It’s just a great play and I have no intention of being ultra-clever with it because the text is so good. I have made a few cuts but I’m sticking really solidly with the original.’

I suggested they are so well written they almost direct themselves. ‘That’s absolutely right.’ Paul agreed. ‘I keep looking at it and thinking if you have decent people in it, it should look after itself. I went down the route of how symbolic can we be with things. I considered projecting bits of film in the background showing the slums and back-streets of London at the time but finally we said that it wasn’t important, that is just extraneous, it is not needed, just do the text. Concentrate on the acting of it and it should work.’

MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION is significant in that, for the first time you have big names in an Everyman production. ‘We had to adopt that policy because we are taking it on tour and the first thing the other theatres ask is “who are the names?” not name, but names. I’m very pleased with who we have. Everybody is very much on board with the way we want to do it.’ Paul told me.

But, I wondered, how did he go about finding the right actors? ‘A soon as we decide on this play I said that I wanted Sue Holderness to do it. I know Sue a little bit and I think she is absolutely dead right for it. Christopher Timothy was here a couple of years ago with THE DIARY OF ANN FRANK and I remember passing him in a corridor backstage and thinking he was the right age and the right type, so we went for him.’ Paul continued. ‘He was well up for it, it’s a great part, it’s not huge but it’s a good part. Emily Woodward who plays Sue’s daughter was actually recommended by Sue. Emily is the daughter of Edward Woodward and Michelle Dotrice and she and Sue had played mother and daughter before so it would save a lot of time in the rehearsal room getting to know each other. We still held auditions and Emily did the best audition so that was fine. We also have Richard Derrington who was in CIDER WITH ROSIE.’

It all sounded really interesting so I was keen to find out what the play was about. Paul took a deep breath. ‘There’s a young girl called Vivie Warren who has been educated to what we would now call degree standard which was very rare in Victorian England. And of course somebody has had to pay for this education. It turns out it was her mother but we don’t know where the money has come from. During the course of the play it becomes clear that Mrs Warren had a profession which has made her a lot of money which enabled her to educate her daughter. When Vivie finds out where the money has come from she starts to disown her mother but holds on to the relationship thinking that the profession is a thing of the past. But then we find out the business is still very current and making huge amounts of money. At that point the relationship completely disintegrates.’

Paul continued, ‘There are romances along the way, a lot of different men are courting the girl for various reasons but as the relationship between mother and daughter breaks down all the suitors disappear. It all sounds a bit bleak but there are some great humorous moments in it. But the important thing is that the audience enjoys seeing all these hypocrisy of all these different people who are trying to lead moderate Victorian traditional heart and home lives but underneath we see all the other things.’

I said it sounded very much like AN INSPECTOR CALLS and to a certain extent this debunking of Victorian hypocrisy has become predictable, a cliché even. ‘Yes, but it wasn’t then.’ Paul argued. ‘George Bernard Shaw was a great, great fan of Ibsen who had started all that thing about finding out what goes on beneath the surface with all those middle class people. In its time, don’t forget, it was very new. It’s a very simple story but our enjoyment is seeing all these respectable characters at the start fall from grace.’

You’ve lined up a good tour for after the Everyman run haven’t you? ‘I’m loving the tour. After Cheltenham we go to the Salisbury Playhouse, Exeter Northcott, Oxford Playhouse, Cambridge Arts and Malvern. Malvern of course is brilliant because Shaw premiered so many of his plays there but it’s ages since they had one of his plays there.’

But it wasn’t all going to be plain sailing. Paul agreed. ‘MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION is going to be quite a hard sell but if you don’t do these plays you get nothing back but these great classic plays have got to be kept going. Shakespeare’s always done of course but it’s important to keep the other great plays alive as well because that’s our culture, it’s theatre heritage.’  Michael Hasted

Text and photo © Michael HASTED 2015

Interview first published in, and courtesy of, THE CHELTONIAN magazine June 2015