Mother-daughter duo bring new life to George Bernard Shaw's morality play

Written in 1893, George Bernard Shaw's morality play was so scandalous at the time, it was banned by the Lord Chamberlain and not performed publicly in London until 1925. The writer's "sin", said Susannah Clapp in The Observer, was to make his protagonist a former prostitute and "brothel-keeper who unrepentantly profits from her trade" – and fails "either to kill herself or to melt into sentimental gold-heartedness" when exposed. Like so much of Shaw's work, Mrs. Warren's Profession is highly verbose, but for this production, director Dominic Cooke has hacked away at the "repetitions, Shavian curlicues" and so on, to liberate "the drama's heart". It's a "sensuous, smart staging" of a "problem play", agreed Alice Saville in The Independent – featuring a "magnificent" performance from Imelda Staunton in the title role.

Much of the drama turns on Kitty Warren's relationship with her daughter Vivie – a recent Cambridge graduate who has only just learnt how her mother funded her comfortable life, said Sarah Crompton on What's on Stage. She is played by Bessie Carter – Staunton's own daughter – and the "result is an extraordinary tour de force that brings the play to vivid and compelling life". In a "brilliant" stroke, the director deploys a chorus of women, clad in 1920s underwear, who observe the action and gradually demolish the simple set – in a symbolic stripping away of illusions that is surprisingly effective.

I'm afraid I found it all a bit muted, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian – "like a Wilde play without the jokes". The mother-daughter duologues are full of life, but the "scenes around them feel filled with extraneous, thinly drawn characters and plot". As for the scantily clad chorus, it struck me as "reductively decorative", said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph – and the production overall seemed somewhat "anodyne". "Shaw, the old radical, would be glad to see how his work has endured – but wouldn't he also want it showing a bit more fire in its belly?"

The Garrick Theatre, London WC2. Until 16 August

by Yiyun Li

The Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li begins her "quietly devastating" memoir by "laying out the facts", said Suzanne Joinson in The Guardian. "And those facts, raw and precise, are shattering." Li and her husband had two sons, Vincent and James. Vincent died in 2017, aged 16; James died in 2024, aged 19. Both ended their lives by jumping in front of trains not far from the family home in New Jersey. Both were academically gifted, but had very different personalities. Vincent, who "loved baking and knitting", was the more flamboyant and emotional of the two – a boy, Li says, who lived "feelingly". James, by contrast, a "brilliant linguist", was "self-contained, somewhat unreachable", more at home with facts than feelings. If Vincent died because he couldn't cope with his emotions, James, Li suggests, "died from thinking". The story she tells in "Things in Nature Merely Grow" is so terrible that it "can only be conveyed through a restrained and astringent English". Yet the effect of this is not to distance the reader, but to create an "almost unbearable intimacy".

Li, who grew up in Beijing, and began her "prize-winning literary career" after moving to the US in 1996, is fiercely resistant to "platitudes about loss and grief", said Daphne Merkin in The New York Times. "Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process," she writes, "and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone." Instead of grief, she strives for "radical acceptance" – which seems to mean being aware that she is condemned to exist in the "abyss", while also carrying on in the normal world – getting out of bed at the regular time, playing the piano, studying Euclidean geometry. "Life is stubborn," she writes. "So am I."

Li offers some context to her son's deaths by exploring her own past, said Helen Brown in The Telegraph. We learn that she was "relentlessly belittled and beaten by her mother as a child", and that she suffered bouts of severe depression, and twice attempted suicide when her sons were young. Did this, she asks bluntly, make "death feel like a viable solution to life's problems" for them? In the face of such unanswerable questions, Li "resists anger or regret", opting instead for a "cool-headed clarity". There's something remarkable about her "determination to live with dignity and defiance through this extremity", said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. A work of "harsh beauty", her memoir is "unlike any other book I've read".

Artist and writer who was at the heart of Swinging London

So. Farewell then… Barry Fantoni, you were a writer, cartoonist, artist, jazz musician and sometime actor, but were perhaps best known as the creator of E.J. Thribb, Private Eye magazine's 17-and-a-half-year-old poet in residence, whose obituary verses appeared under the heading "In Memoriam". Comically deadpan, these were written in rhymeless free form and addressed the deceased person directly. Most contained the line "that was your catchphrase"; many referred to the views of Thribb's friend Keith or the memories of Keith's mum; and they almost invariably began, "So. Farewell then…"

Fantoni, who has died aged 85, joined the satirical magazine in 1963, two years after it was founded, and became an "indispensable part of its fabric" for nearly half a century, said The Times. He contributed a flow of satirical cartoons and bubble captions; he also co-wrote (with Richard Ingrams) Sylvie Krin's Mills & Boon-style stories, often about the royal family, and pioneered the Colemanballs column. He was close friends with Peter Cook, the magazine's main owner – whose death in 1995 was marked with a cover bearing his photograph, and the words "So. Farewell then…" Fantoni's profile was lower. In 2008, the Eye noted that a "contributor with Italian connections" had been ejected from The French House in Soho, for becoming over-excited while marking his 45th year at the magazine. It did not name that contributor; but for regular readers, there will have been no need to.

Whereas the founders of the Eye were mainly from establishment backgrounds – former public schoolboys and Oxford educated – Barry Fantoni was born into a culturally diverse family in the East End of London. His mother Sarah, who was Jewish, was of French and Dutch descent; his father, an artist, was Italian. Barry was sent to Archbishop Temple's School, a grammar school in Lambeth, where a socialist art teacher who "rolled his own sweaters and knitted his own fags" helped him win a scholarship to Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, said The Independent. He was expelled, however, for various offences perpetrated while drunk (and, he suspected, for depicting members of staff naked "à la Toulouse-Lautrec", but with large erections). He decamped to Paris, played in jazz bands on the Left Bank, then returned to London, where he completed his education at the Slade. He taught at Croydon Art School alongside Bridget Riley and Howard Hodgkin; painted The Beatles on the cusp of fame in 1962 (Paul McCartney has the canvas); and worked in a studio where musicians including Pete Townshend and Ray Davies would gather.

At the same time, he was writing sketches for "That Was the Week That Was", which brought him into the orbit of the Eye team. He brought a more pop cultural tinge to the magazine, by satirising pop stars and footballers. Its fortnightly schedule left time to make his mark in other ways in Swinging London: he designed a pop art backdrop for "Ready Steady Go!"; presented the BBC youth show "A Whole Scene Going"; and acted in films opposite the likes of Michael York and Tom Courtenay. He also designed posters, exhibited at the RA's Summer Exhibition, and for a decade he produced a daily pocket cartoon for The Times. He finally retired from the Eye in 2010. For the past few years he had lived in Turin with his partner Katie, who survives him.