Only a few hours left to hear a decent radio rendition of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession on the BBC’s new “drama and comedy” channel, Radio 4 Extra. The channel (a revamping of BBC 7, only without the big block of children’s programming) has been running Shaw plays weekly for the past month or so. The BBC website and internet radio apps let you play (though not download) shows for a week after they’ve been broadcast. Mrs. Warren’s time is up late Saturday night, April 23.
This version of Shaw’s show about a business-minded, socially mobile prostitute and the daughter who’s been kept in the dark about her mother’s livelihood, stars Maggie Steed and Ron Cook and originally aired in 2002. The programming slot for it was 90 minutes, which when you’re doing Shaw means a lot of cutting. It ends up being extremely talky at the beginning and the end, and amusingly descriptive in the middle. I love hearing audio versions of Shaw because I always hear pithy bits which can be missed when his plays are staged, or read in book form. I’d rather hear uncut versions, but there’s been plenty to like. There’s also the fascination of hearing a decade-old rendition of a play which has recently been rediscovered as a plum vehicle for actresses of a certain age: Cherry Jones and Elizabeth Ashley played Mrs. Warren in 2010, and a production starring Felicity Kendall is currently touring England.
New Haven, Connecticut, where I live, has regularly been ahead of the curve on this play—it had its U.S. premiere at the Hyperion Theatre on Chapel Street in 1905, and was produced at the Yale Rep in both 1981 and 2002.
What has been the Shaw slot on Radio 4 Extra (before Mrs. Warren came Candida and Arms and the Man) will be filled over the next few weeks by an audio adaptation of the Ealing film comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (with British comedian Harry Enfield taking on the parts originated by Alec Guinness) and the two-play series The Other Side of the Hill by Peter Luke, about the Duke of Wellington.