Imelda Staunton and her daughter are superbly matched in Mrs Warren’s Profession

You can almost catch the heady scent of the pastel-hued flowers that deck the stage of Dominic Cooke's sensuous, smart staging of George Bernard Shaw’s 1892 problem play. Almost, but not quite, because they’re fake – as misleading as the romantic trappings of Victorian femininity worn by this story’s two ruthlessly formidable women. Imelda Staunton is magnificent as the titular Mrs Warren, who’s bought respectability for her daughter (played by her real-life offspring Bessie Carter) by selling herself – and a horde of other girls she plucked and then discarded.

Of course, Shaw never uses words such as “brothel” or “madam”. He’d never dream of mentioning the act itself! Still, his ruthlessly practical perspectives on the sex trade were so outrageous to late Victorian society that the play was banned for 30 years. It’s so easy for revivals of once-shocking plays to feel like artefacts – their once-progressive views seeming regressive with the advent of new times and terminologies. But Shaw was a lifelong socialist whose critiques of capitalism here feel all too relevant: Mrs Warren’s arguments that sex work is far more dignified than grinding poverty could come straight from a 2025 meeting of the English Collective of Prostitutes. And Cooke’s pared-back production lets that modernity shine out, scrapping all that tedious late-Victorian stage business of tablecloths and rattling teacups in favour of a simple circle of greenery – ravishingly imagined by designer Chloe Lamford – that gradually gets stripped away between scenes by 10 haunted-looking girls in stockings, corsets and bloomers.

They’re the unseen sex workers in this story – a visual representation of the “nine in 10 women” that Mrs Warren argues are forced into the trade by economic circumstances, not choice. Staunton is on tremendous form as this faintly cockney-accented grande dame, a hard head under her fluffy coiffure. “Women have to pretend to feel a great deal that they don’t feel,” she says, to audience murmurs of approval, as she styles sex work for survival as just one of the many moral compromises required by female members of a patriarchal society.

Her daughter Vivie is convinced... up to a point. She’s a fascinating creation, one of Shaw’s hard-talking bevy of “New Women” who he used to embody the changing values of a new era. Immune to the lure of pretty dress and fine jewels, she’s studying mathematics at Cambridge and preparing to carve out a living of her own. When she first discovers her mother’s past, she appreciates her sound practical reasons, and the two walk with linked arms – the pair’s real-life mother-daughter relationship lending a welcome cosiness to this moment. But soon, things get messy. Vivie’s love interest Frank (played by a hilariously bumptious Reuben Joseph) transpires to be her half-brother, and Mrs Warren’s past turns out to be a bit more present than she’d like.

Shaw’s incestuous plotline has aged a lot less well than his perspectives on the sex trade. So it’s a relief that Cooke saves his energies for the third act’s brilliantly performed showpiece confrontation between mother and daughter, where Shaw writes women who think and debate as they’d never been allowed to on stage before. Carter brings a subtle note of internal conflict to Vivie’s resolutely rational arguments, here, half breaking as she rejects her mother’s attempts at sentiment. And Staunton’s broken cry of “Who'll take care of me when I'm old?” hits home, her former staunchness evaporated.

Like Shaw’s later play Pygmalion (turned into musical My Fair Lady), Mrs Warren’s Profession originally interrogated social class as well as gender – this cockney mother is meant to embarrass, as well as scandalise, her expensively educated daughter. Wisely, Cooke dials down that aspect of the story and gives Mrs Warren all possible dignity, her origins supplied instead by the vulnerable-feeling, underdressed women who linger at the end of the stage. And their silence is a reminder that, however persuasive her perspectives are, they’re not the last word on the subject.

On at the Garrick theatre, London, until 16 August