History

Written in 1893, and banned until 1925, Bernard Shaw’s provocative comedy was considered to be too controversial for the English stage and at its first American staging in 1905, the entire cast was arrested. Full of strong characters, witty and sharp dialogue, the play is an indictment of the double standards in Victorian society regarding sex and money.

The following extract has been taken from George Bernard Shaw's preface to Mrs. Warren's Profession...

MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION was written in 1894 to draw attention to the truth that prostitution is caused, not by female depravity and male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying, undervaluing and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together. Indeed all attractive unpropertied women lose money by being infallibly virtuous or contracting marriages that are not more or less venal. If on the large social scale we get what we call vice instead of what we call virtue it is simply because we are paying more for it. No normal woman would be a professional prostitute if she could better herself by being respectable, nor marry for money if she could afford to marry for love.
Also I desired to expose the fact that prostitution is not only carried on without organisation by individual enterprise in the lodgings of solitary women, each her own mistress as well as every customer's mistress, but organised and exploited as a big international commerce for the profit of capitalists like any other commerce, and very lucrative to great city estates, including Church estates, through the rents of the houses in which it is practiced.
I could not have done anything more injurious to my prospects at the outset of my career. My play was immediately stigmatized by the Lord Chamberlain, who by Act of Parliament has despotic and even super monarchical power over out theatres, as 'immoral and otherwise improper for the stage'. Its performance was prohibited, I myself being branded by implication, to my great damage, as an unscrupulous and blackguardly author. True, I have lived this defamation down, and am apparently none the worse. True too that the stage under the censorship became so licentious after the war that the ban on a comparatively prudish play like mine became ridiculous and had to be lifted. Also I admit that my career as a revolutionary critic of our most respected institutions kept me so continually in hot water that the addition of another jugful of boiling fluid by the Lord Chamberlain troubled me too little to entitle me to personal commiseration, especially as the play greatly strengthened my repute among serious readers. Besides, in 1894 the ordinary commercial theatres would have nothing to say to me, Lord Chamberlain or no Lord Chamberlain.  None the less the injury done me now admittedly indefensible, was real and considerable, and the injury to society much greater; for when the White Slave Traffic, as Mrs. Warren's profession came to be called, was dealt with legislatively, all that Parliament did was to enact that prostitutes' male bullies and parasites should be flogged, leaving Mrs. Warren in complete command of the situation, and its true nature more effectually masked than ever. It was he fault of Censorship that our legislators and journalists were not better instructed.
In 1902, the Stage Society, technically a club giving private performances for the entertainment of its own members, and therefore exempt from the Lord Chamberlain's jurisdiction, resolved to perform the play. None of the public theatres dared brave his displeasure (he has absolute power to close them if they offend him) by harbouring the performance; but another club which had a little stage, and which rather courted a pleasantly scandalous reputation, opened its doors for one night and one afternoon. 

- George Bernard Shaw  (taken from the preface to Mrs. Warren's Profession)

Mrs. Warren's Profession is available to purchase as part of the the Bernard Shaw trilogy  Plays Unpleasant published by Penguin Plays and priced at £7.99

Mrs. Warren's Profession opens on May 6th at the Oxford Playhouse Theatre and tours the United Kingdom until July 28th.