Mrs Warren's Profession, Royal Lyceum Edinburgh

Mrs Warren's Profession, George Bernard Shaw's early play exposing hypocritical Victorian mores, had to wait until 1905 for its first public performance, some ten years after its first publication. So explosively seditious were its contents considered that the Lord Chamberlain banned its performance outright. It took Shaw's own money to finally give the piece the run it deserved in a private members' club.

In 2007, it could be easy to mistake the Victorian finery of the costumes and the mannered suavity of Shaw's dialogue as simply another enjoyable period piece. But with poverty still driving young women into prostitution, Shaw's tale of a high class international madam from an impoverished background who has propelled her unwitting daughter through boarding school and Cambridge with the proceeds of her dubious career, packs as powerful a message now as it did then. Indeed, Shaw's refusal to condemn his eponymous protagonist makes this work a key feminist text.

Royal Lyceum and Nottingham Playhouse's suitably nuanced production is acted with flair and does justice to the moral ambiguities slyly revealed by Shaw's witty script. Paola Dionisotti's wonderfully modulated Mrs Warren conducts proceedings with aplomb, supported eloquently by Emma Stansfield as her daughter, Vivie. John Bett, too, is excellent, creating real depth to old family friend Praed with a deceptive lightness of touch. As the play draws to its depressingly predictable denouement, Vivie declaims that "…there is no such thing as circumstance!" as she primly banishes her mother from her life for her newly discovered moral improprieties. Shaw may have shocked Victorian England with his studied ambivalence but Vivie's joyless, proto-Thatcherite dismissal of her mother suggest where Shaw's sympathies truly lay. [Hugo Fluendy]