Legendary Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw – apart from winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925 “for idealism and humanity”, and also winning an Academy Award for Pygmalion – wrote more than 50 plays.

One of his most controversial, Mrs Warren’s Profession, written in 1894, was banned for years. When first performed in New York, the police interrupted the production and arrested the cast!

So what was all the fuss about? Shaw had dared – in the midst of stifling Victorian values – to create a woman successfully running a string of brothels across Europe.

Years before British women were granted the vote in 1928, and decades before feisty feminism erupted in the 1970s, Shaw – like HG Wells’ groundbreaking novel Ann Veronica in 1909 – was championing women’s rights.

This atmospheric revival is set with convincing period costumes, dialogue and mannerisms.

Daily Echo:

Six fine actors – including Christopher Timothy and Sue Holderness – deliver excellent performances in a wordy script.

Although pedestrian in the first act, the pace explodes into dramatic passions in the second, with astounding revelations.

The words “prostitute” and “brothel” are never actually mentioned in the play, but Shaw’s dialogue – especially revealing poverty wages and long hours – has a contemporary resonance with today’s “zero hours contracts”, graduate “interns” working for nothing, and the cynical political manipulation of statistics and airbrushing of protest marches.

Artistically, the set design effectively begins like a coloured Victorian postcard, gradually bleeding into gritty monochrome.

Runs until Saturday.

Brendan McCusker