Every year, FHM produces its 100 sexiest women of the year list. It follows a simple formula, since sexiness, as determined by the magazine’s readers, is predicated on fame – a particular type of fleeting, red-top tabloid fame. So this year, top of that list is Tulisa of the sex tapes. Likewise, every year Art Review does its 100 most powerful people in the art world list. So what is it to be the most powerful person in the art world? What is its relationship to fame, market value and fashion?

With only a modest, handheld camera and an iPhone at his disposal, the internationally acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi shot this film in secret whilst under house arrest. His close friend, and co-director of this film, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, then smuggled it into France hidden in a cake as a last-minute submission to Cannes last year.

Although the title of this new DVD box set was a given considering the nature of the films included, all six films collected are – whatever their reputation, levels of nudity and explicitness – sober-minded, hardly measuring up to any standard of what normally constitutes erotica. Three are dry sex education films, presented by real-life psychologists, while the other three are bizarre examinations of an alienated young women in relationships that involve power play, subjugation and abuse. Like nightmare, no-budget counterparts of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage.

They don’t make films like Red Psalm any more. They rarely made them then either. In Red Psalm (1971), Miklós Jancsó imagined a corner of a Hungarian field in 1898 in which the forces of revolution were pitted against the uniformed, armed and often mounted might of the establishment. But unlike a regular piece of schlock-heroic agitprop, Jancsó envisions an encounter that is somewhere between a ballet and a debate, a folk opera and a game of toy soldiers.

I hadn't thought this one through very well. As someone who was put off horror films by a window crashing onto a hand in one of the Amityville movies at least two decades ago, watching Time Shift: Dear Censor last night, which promised to show some of cinema's most notorious scenes, was probably unwise. Happily, standards of gore, violence and sex have dropped so fast in the past 20 years that what was censorable in 1991 is PG now.

Whatever the quality of the material with which they're grappling, there are two undeniable truths about the Belarusian actors who've put their already curtailed freedom on the line by coming to the Almeida Festival this week: they're skilled practitioners of their art and courageous human beings. Read their biographies in the programme and you'll see that the words "detained", "arrested", "attacked", "dismissed" crop up rather a lot. In Europe's last dictatorship, stepping out on stage and speaking a line, a word even, can lead to imprisonment.

When people talk incessantly of freedom of speech, it means they are proud to have it or desperate to have it or desperate to defend it, or a mixture of all three. In Hong Kong, where I went at the end of May for the fourth edition of ART HK, people in the art world are constantly mentioning how free their speech is or else using a symbol to prove it - Ai Weiwei, the artist now imprisoned by China for "economic crimes" (ie subversive art). By speaking of Ai and displaying his work, one might almost get the impression China was not just to the north and three decades away from total control. Outside the art fair, alongside the Hong Kong flag, flies China's.

Over here we had our own obscenity trial in 1960. Before Lady Chatterley’s Lover made it into the dock, it’s always said that sex in the UK didn’t exist while no sooner had the judge pronounced it not guilty of obscenity than everyone was at it very promptly. Thus does the collective memory simplify. As is usually the case, America got there first. Literature of a provocative nature was put on trial when in 1957 Allen Ginsberg’s priapic epic Howl found itself up before the beak.

George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play was deemed too scandalous for public performance in Britain and was banned by the Lord Chamberlain until 1925, and its New York premiere in 1905 caused such outrage that the cast were arrested. Its offence was that Shaw was writing about the world’s oldest profession, prostitution, and alluded to a possible incestuous coupling. His greatest crime, though, was the play’s attack on Victorian hypocrisy.

For prostitution, of course, could not exist with what we now would call a solid customer base, and it was a profession allowed to flourish with the collusion of the Victorian establishment, some of whom were its most enthusiastic customers. And Shaw was also attacking capitalism's part in the sex trade; in the play’s preface he wrote that prostitution was caused: “... by underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together.”

The last sentence, sadly, could have been written last week and Mrs Warren’s Profession has so many other modern parallels - a fractured mother-daughter relationship, women being treated as mere playthings, among them - that it’s ripe for a revival, here in a Theatre Royal Bath production, directed by Michael Rudman.

As the play begins we see Mrs Warren’s daughter, Vivie (whose father is unknown), awaiting her homecoming with one of her mother’s many male friends, the artist Mr Praed; when she arrives, we realise mother and daughter are not close. Vivie has recently had the benefit of a Cambridge education (but no degree - this is some time before women were allowed to matriculate) and lives on a comfortable allowance, both paid for by her mother’s lucrative brothels on the Continent, of which she knows nothing. Shaw, for all he was a proto-feminist, draws Vivie rather coarsely; she has no truck with art or love and she describes her lifestyle as “work followed by a comfortable chair, a cigar and a whisky”.

Others gathered for the party are Sir George Crofts, a middle-aged bachelor who, we learn, lent Mrs Warren a large sum to establish her upmarket whorehouses (with a handsome 35 per cent annual return), the local vicar Mr Gardner, who has “a past” with Mrs Warren, and his handsome but feckless son Frank, who is swooningly in love with Vivie.

Mrs Warren (Felicity Kendal) decides to tell Vivie (Lucy Briggs-Owen) where her wealth comes from. At first this emancipated young woman is sympathetic, angry that her mother had to choose between an early death like her sister’s in a lead factory, or selling her body. But when she realises that the business still exists she becomes instantly judgmental and rejects her mother. Over the course of the evening both Frank and Crofts propose marriage to Vivie, but she rebuffs them - she would rather be alone than have a fool for a husband, or enter into matrimony with the cold-hearted Crofts, who presents the marriage contract as the same as that between a whore and her customer, but as more socially acceptable. He’s a charmer, no mistakin’.

The heart of the play is the fourth-act attempt at a rapprochement between Vivie and Mrs Warren, in which Shaw’s arguments are lucidly put as the mother seeks to justify her job and the daughter takes the high moral ground. Briggs-Owen (whose face could perhaps be a little less expressive at times) shows real spark in her exchanges with Kendal, who moves chillingly between guilt and rage as we realise the two women are equally stubborn in their refusal to compromise. In the end, Vivie rejects her mother and her would-be suitors and decides to make her own, independent - and highly moral - way through life.

Solid support for the two women comes from Mark Tandy as Praed and Eric Carte as Rev Gardner, while David Yelland’s Crofts grows more vile by each scene. The production’s highlight is Max Bennett as Frank, who shows a real gift for comedy.

I wish I could say I enjoyed this more than I did. Mrs Warren’s Profession is Shaw’s least didactic play and has plenty of sharp lines to keep one amused, the cast play their parts nicely and Paul Farnsworth’s sets look rather lovely. But it adds up to less than the sum of its parts, mostly because the direction is so plodding - there’s an awful lot of declaiming lines sitting down - and it can’t quite make up its mind whether it is Victorian melodrama, Chekhovian tragedy or Wildean comedy

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