This is not the first production of George Bernard Shaw’s once-banned 1893 play about a mother-daughter reckoning to cast a real-life mother and daughter. Caroline and Rose Quentin performed it together at Theatre Royal Bath in 2022. Imelda Staunton and Bessie Carter here make a more compelling double act and bring an added frisson to the play’s intimacies and disputes.
Carter plays Vivie, a no-nonsense young woman with ambitions to take up the legal profession. Her mother, Kitty (Staunton), has a successful profession of her own – the world’s oldest – and a string of brothels to her name. When Kitty visits Vivie, who has just graduated from Cambridge, this secret is explosively revealed.
