Pygmalion
by George Bernard Shaw
at the Chichester Festival Theatre
Think
of Pygmalion and you think of My Fair Lady; think of Rex Harrison and
co and GBS does not instantly spring to mind. Probably for that reason alone I
have never seen the play that earned the great socialist an Oscar. And a good
enough excuse to get back to Chichester, after not going last year. Luckily it
was a lovely driving day last Saturday, and we sped through the sun lit bucolic
downs of Surrey and Sussex with ease. The Festival Theatre was, as ever, packed
for the matinee and there were even a handful of punters younger than us. But
for all I might poke gentle fun at the theatre, it is a fabulous space and
creates a great atmosphere. Huge, garish music hall flats gave us our opening
location, a stormy night in Coven Garden where the penniless Eliza tries to
sell her flowers to a bunch of uncaring toffs while the eccentric Higgins notes
down her speech patterns.
As you might expect, this is a good cast. The good professor is played by a moody Rupert Everett as a graceless, selfish boorish man. His lack of manners is irredeemable, much to the chagrin of his long suffering mother, played marvellously by Stephanie Cole. Her look of horror when he son pays her a surprise visit is wonderful. His barbed edges are tempered by Peter Eyre’s all-smooth Colonel Pickering, who has more than enough manners for the pair of them. Their experiment with Eliza is condemned by Mrs Higgins and housekeeper Mrs Pierce (played by Susie Blake) as men’s stupidity. And Eliza herself? She was played by the unlikely named Honeysuckle Weeks in a technical tour de force. From a guttersnipe barely able to enunciate a clear word she next appears as a stilted ‘lady’ speaking something that is clearly a foreign language. Only at the end does she have her own voice, in more ways than one. The other comic turn comes from yet another familiar face, Phil Davis as Eliza’s father. Speaking as a member of the ‘undeserving poor’ he wants to sell Eliza for the price of a bender. When offered £10 he shuns it; it is too much money for someone like him. Given that sort of money he may have to be prudent, and so turn his back on his class.
The text is much cut and the story proceeds at pace. From picking up the girl and taking her in, Eliza rapidly makes enough progress to attend Mrs Higgins soiree, perhaps the funniest scene in the play. As she speaks of her aunt being ‘done in’ to the perplexity of the other guests – and the enchantment of one, future husband Freddie. The new small talk was probably never going to catch on. We then find her after the great triumph, bewildered and alone as the men talk about rather than to her. In the only typical GBS scene she talks to Higgins in a one-to-one conversation of utter non-communication and decides, for better or worse, to marry Freddie because at least he loves her. There were one or two strange directorial touches – Why Wagner for the scene-setting? And, most puzzlingly, why did he include two 15 minute intervals in quick succession?
Pygmalion is not the deepest play GBS ever wrote, but is probably the most entertaining. Played for pace and laughs, it nonetheless poses the troubling questions of whether you can create a woman of a certain class, and questions what ‘society’ means. But despite being in Chichester, I doubt these questions have the force they did when the play was written at the dawn of the Great War. Suffice it to say it is a great cast, a highly entertaining play and well worth the effort of getting there.