Vivie Warren (Rebecca O’Mara) is a person without sentiment or poetry, a woman with highly developed mathematical skills making her way in the world through hard mental labour. She feels independent of the expectations of her gender: a modern woman free even of the conventional ties of daughterhood. Her mother, Kitty (Sorcha Cusack), sends her a regular stipend but otherwise largely leaves her be. But Mrs. Warren is no longer a young woman. In prelude to a period of greater closeness with her daughter in her old age, she arrives with Sir George Crofts (David Yelland), a wealthy, crusty old acquaintance. His amorous advances towards Vivie are as unwelcome as those from long-time acquaintance Frank Gardner (Tadgh Murphy) whose father Sam (Bosco Hogan) is the local pastor. But where does Mrs. Warren’s money come from? Vivie knows nothing about her, really, and is about to learn the truth.

This new production of Shaw’s scandalous 1894 trope on prostitution raises some troubling questions. The exploitation of women continues, of course, and the programme notes drawn from Shaw’s own preface to the published playscript (recited throughout the play by Risteárd Cooper as the voice of Shaw) make this abundantly clear. Before curtain, a quote from the preface is emblazoned across the set (a collage of vintage and contemporary images of nude and semi-nude women), to the effect that we should never think of abuse issues as “old unhappy far-off things.”

But Shaw hits hardest and most clearly at the heart of this matter by steering it away from the purely moral domain. Exploitation has everything and nothing to do with sexuality per se. He makes explicit the link between industrial capitalism and the reduction of labour both of the body and the mind to a cost-benefit analysis. In this play every relationship is a transaction and every conversation is a negotiation. “I don’t want to be worthless,” says Vivie, as she ruthlessly dismisses her mother, whose justifications for her way of life are rooted in poverty and fear of slavery (a term Shaw uses pointedly and repeatedly). This is initially acceptable to Vivie, but then tainted by association with the odious Crofts, who makes clear he believes that marrying Vivie is a deal that can be closed with sufficient leverage. Everything has a price.

This is a play about the intractable power of capitalism and the polarisation of humanity into masters and slaves. If you’re not one, he tells us, you’re the other. The most scabrous and cynical element of the text is in its ultimate resolution. To “choose your line and go through with it,” as Shaw puts it, Vivie is still a slave in the end. She may be master of the numbers, but she remains inculcated within the mechanisms of capital. She is, after all, producing mathematical calculations for engineers, scientists, and insurance companies without thinking about their use. No better slave has systematic economic exploitation than an unsentimental mind lacking in poetry.

Against this almost nihilistic backdrop (Shaw labelled this one of his ‘Unpleasant’ plays, after all), Patrick Mason’s production is a puzzle. It would seem eminently and urgently relevant, but it also draws us back into dialogue with the nineteenth-century in ways that are arguably counterproductive. It’s hard to know if the excessive familiarity of the mise-en-scène and the arch performances are designed to invite mockery, suggest parody, or set the audience up for a fall. Shaw’s dialogue is so self-consciously rhetorical that the play is already just a small step away from Brechtian distanciation, and its political resonance is so pronounced that steeping us in the nineteenth-century context through costumes, accents, intonations, and rote characterisations is potentially distracting.

The technical execution of these things isn't so much the issue as their application. The design and performances are fully realised in the chosen idiom, and the production does deliver some moments of human drama, particularly in the ‘negotiation’ scene between O’Mara and Yelland and later the climactic confrontation between mother and daughter where Cusack is required to work through the logic of Shaw’s most despairing presentation of human motivation. (Does Mrs. Warren really think she’s bought herself a daughter or are we seeing the tragic cyclical logic of exploitation, demanding our sympathy?) But somehow there is less clarity of purpose than that suggested by the metatextual scaffolding in the programme notes and production design. It feels over-directed but out of focus. What should be powerful, relevant, and challenging feels vague and outmoded. It’s not a satisfying production, though there is value in hearing Shaw ask questions that still don’t have answers.

Harvey O’Brien is a writer and critic, and lectures in Film Studies at University College Dublin. His latest book is Action Movies: The Cinema of Striking Back (Nov, 2012).