I always go to see Pygmalion with the wrong attitude. I go to see those supercilious snobs have their noses put out of joint when the Cockney girl shows them up for what they are – and that’s just the people in the audience who act like Professor Henry Higgins, writes Michael Holland.
Higgins (Bertie Carvel)is a socially awkward phonetic geek who today would be diagnosed as being high on the spectrum. He is a phonetics bore whose own mother bans from the house when she has friends round. When he is seen spying on flower seller Eliza Doolittle (Patsy Ferran) she remonstrates loud enough to attract an angry crowd and to get an explanation from Higgins, who is merely noting down the way she speaks. He confirms his innocence by saying where all those around him hailed from just by listening to them talk.
Eliza, who seeks to climb out of her lowly position, believes that speaking properly would help her scale the social ladder from selling flowers on the street to selling flowers in a shop. She offers Higgins a shilling a week to teach her and in his astonishment at this cheeky offer he says he will do it for nothing to prove to his friend, Colonel Pickering (Michael Gould), that he could ‘pass her off as a Duchess in good society’. Pickering is more concerned with what Higgins will do with the young woman when he has completed the challenge: ‘Toss her back into the gutter!’ He says without a thought for anything other than himself. If this was panto we would all be booing.
Eliza is embedded in at Wimpole Street to undertake her course of education but her father, Alfred (John Marquez) turns up to do a deal for his daughter – which shows exactly the kind of man he is – and takes £5 for her. ‘I can’t afford morals,’ he whimpers, fooling nobody. ‘I’m one of the undeserving poor battling middle-class morality,’ he adds, ensuring no one is on his side.
And so we quicken through the training in preparation for the ball, Eliza’s grand entrance and her passing with flying colours.
Alas, with such speed taken to arrive at this point, there was no time for us to get an inkling that Higgins may have developed feelings for Eliza on the way, so in the final scenes when he starts sulking at Eliza going off to marry persistent beau Freddy (Taheen Modak), we were left wondering why when he had not shown one iota of affection for her. If only the professor had a song like ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face’ to let us all know he cared more about Miss Doolittle than his slippers.
The set was like the inside of Abbey Road studio rather than a professor’s house with walls lined with fusty old books, and this version seems to be placed between the wars rather than in Victorian times.
But good performances from all helped save this great George Bernard Shaw play that has been turned into rather an oddity here.
Old Vic, The Cut, SE1 until 28th October. Times: Mon-Sat 7.30pm; Sat matinees 2.30pm. Admission: £10 – £77.50.
Booking: www.oldvictheatre.com
