31 October 2025

George Bernard Shaw’s play, ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’, was written in 1893 but banned by the Lord Chamberlain. It wasn’t performed in public until 1925, the year in which Shaw received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

It was recently performed at the Garrick Theatre in London with Imelda Staunton as Mrs. Warren and her own daughter as Vivie Warren, her daughter in the play. It was broadcast in cinemas and we saw it in Dundee. It was a magnificent production with brilliant performances all round.

The theme of the play is moral hypocrisy. It focuses on the disparity of wealth, the limited choices of people who are poor especially women and the moral hypocrisy of those who benefitted from Mrs. Warren’s Profession whilst paradoxically banning the play!

Her profession is never mentioned but is very clear. As a working-class woman she has aspired to provide the best for her daughter, Vivie. This included a university education at Newnham, the iconic women’s college founded in 1871 at Cambridge University. She excels in the mathematics tripos.

‘I’m supposed to know something about science,’ she says, ‘but I know nothing except the mathematics it involved. I can make calculations for engineers, electricians, insurance companies, and so on; but I know next to nothing about engineering or electricity or insurance. I don’t even know arithmetic well.’

This struck a bell with me for the elegant results celebrated in mathematics were born out of a whole series of missteps and mistakes. We see none of this in our education. And the real problems which inspired these beautiful results often remain hidden. There’s a hidden world of real people behind it all like Mrs. Warren and her profession!