Mrs Warren's Profession, Candida, and You Never Can Tell are plays
which give a clear sense of the range of Shaw's first forays into
playwriting. Together they showcase his early negotiations between
his political and social concerns and the constraints and
possibilities of the British stage at the fin de siecle. These
plays are bound together by shared concerns with gender roles,
sexuality, concepts of familial and social duty, and how all these
are shaped by wider financial, political, literary, philosophical
and theatrical influences. Mrs Warren's Profession is the best
known of Shaw's 'Plays Unpleasant', his first exercises in using
the theatre as a means to awaken the consciences of morally
complacent audiences. Written in 1893 in angry response to the
success of A. W. Pinero's sensational hit The Second Mrs Tanqueray
and a revival of Dumas's La dame aux camelias, Mrs Warren's
Profession did not receive a public performance in Britain until
1925. Shaw's provocative response to the sentimental 'fallen woman'
plays that dominated the fin-de-siecle stage was a play in which
prostitution was presented not as a question of female sexual
morality, but as a direct result of the systematic economic
exploitation of women. Candida (1894), by contrast, was categorised
by Shaw as one of his 'Plays Pleasant', but the label was
characteristically deceptive. The play appeared at first sight to
offer audiences a reassuringly familiar drama of a marriage
threatened by an interloper but ultimately reaffirmed when the wife
recognises her true place and her dangerous admirer is sent out
into the cold. But, as critics have noted, the play was a
re-working by Shaw of Ibsen's A Doll's House in which the husband
played the part of the over-protected doll, unaware of the real
power dynamics of his marriage. You Never Can Tell (1897) was
Shaw's seaside comedy of manners, complete with an all-knowing
waiter, exuberant twins, a lovelorn dentist, a long-lost father,
lashings of food, and a comic catchphrase to provide the title.
Shaw took all these familiar elements of Victorian farce and
reworked them into a modern play of ideas, in which etiquette and
ideologies collide. Just as in Wilde's The Importance of Being
Earnest (a comparison which Shaw always stubbornly rejected),
questions of class, marriage, manners, money, sex and identity
underpin the plot of love-at-first-sight, mislaid parents and
reunited families.
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