Revival Survival

Cherry Jones will be opening this October in Mrs. Warren's Profession.  It's already in previews.  Sally Hawkins, in her Broadway debut, will play Vivie.  I can't imagine a better cast. Still, I'm not sure if it's the ticket to get.

I don't mind that the play's subject, prostitution as a way to get out of poverty, now seems tame.  The play was banned in its day.  More than a decade after Shaw wrote it, it received a notorious one-night performance in New York.  A review stated the play reached the limit of indecency:

...the play is morally rotten.  It makes no difference that some of the lines have been omitted and others toned down: there was a superabundance of foulness left.  The whole story of the play, the atmosphere surrounding it, the incidents, the personalities of the characters and wholly imnoral and degenerate. [....]  You cannot have a clean pig stye.

The problem isn't the subject. It's that Shaw is still learning. Mrs. Warren's Profession is his third play--an "unpleasant" one. While Shaw was a master of rhetoric from the start (he was in his mid-30s when he got into the theatre), he's still a bit awkward in the beginning, with thinner characters and more overt didacticism (which is saying something for Shaw).  The play is a transitional work, better than the two previous pieces, Widowers' Houses and The Philanderer, but still not reaching the the level he'll bring to his "pleasant" plays such as Arms And The Man and You Never Can Tell.  Indeed, he'd continue writing good to great work for the next 25 or 30 years.  With such a great cast, and so many other plays to choose from, do we really need another production of Mrs. Warren?

PS  The Times article states "its revival history has been somewhat eclipsed by “Major Barbara,” which takes on the sexier-seeming issue of arms manufacture."

What does Major Barbara have to do with anything?  It's one of Shaw's plays, but there are quite a few others that get revived regularly on Broadway, including some with significant female leads such as Candida and Saint Joan.