Stephanie Cole as Mrs Higgins. Photo Manuel Harlan.
Pygmalion
Chichester Festival Theatre until 27 August
Written by Bernard Shaw
Directed and Designed by Philip Prowse
With Rupert Everett, Stephanie Cole, Susie Blake, Phil Davis and Honeysuckle Weeks
On Monday, the double bill at Chichester Festival Theatre was Pygmalion and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist. The two plays could hardly be more different.
Russell focuses with deadly intent on the differences between the working class and their employers. Shaw makes fun of them both.
‘The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.’ – Bernard Shaw
Behind Shaw’s ability to capture an idea with the right phrase was a passion for crusading. And what he was crusading for was a means to persuade the public that good communication depended on the way words were pronounced. This is where Eliza comes into the picture.
Rupert Everett as Professor Higgins. Photo: Manuel Rupert Everett as Professor Higgins in Pygmalion. Photo: Manuel Harlan.
At the turn of the century, London was one of the few big cities in Europe with large-scale street trading. The main reason for this was widespread poverty, with around 30% of the London population barely hovering on the edge of destitution.
Central to this group were the 400,000 casual traders who, like Eliza Doolittle, relied on the precarious economy of the street for their employment. Yet life for young women like Eliza was beginning to change. In 1911, Parliament passed a bill to prohibit street trading by children and young persons.
Girls’ wages became competitive: they were paid the same, or even more, than boys until their late teens. The retail sector was having a ‘boom’ and jobs as a shop assistant, secretary or factory girl were highly attractive, since they offered the opportunity of working in relative comfort compared to the stress of street life.
The Play
Enter Eliza: a flower seller who is also an ambitious young woman but, alas, a young woman whose awful vowels would shatter glass at 60 paces. First, she is insulted by women coming out of Covent Garden opera house into the rain, and then Professor Higgins appears.
He sneers at Eliza as a ghastly example of indigent young women and mimics her voice. She is outraged but incapable of a coherent response. The professor and kindly Colonel Pickering, both of whom are obsessed with linguistics, take a bet that Higgins can’t turn this cabbage into a Duchess for a night. And so the process begins…
Shaw’s play is full of humour and wit, but its message is no less relevant for today’s incoherent and ill-educated young people than it was when it was first performed. Unfortunately, the play is treated more frivolously than it needs to be at CFC.
Like its popular make-over, My Fair Lady, much emphasis falls on lovely clothes and superficial niceties, some of which are very nice indeed. Who wouldn’t fall in love with a set that rises up through the floor with Higgins playing violin to Colonel Pickering’s astute ear?
Peter Eyre as Colonel Pickering and Rupert Everett as Henry Higgins. Photo Manuel Harlan.
The marvellous Stephanie Cole as Mrs Higgins, however, provides both anchor and point of poise for the play. Where Rupert Everett often seems too large and noisy for this (elegant) stage, she brings him back to size metaphorically, and through her superbly projected lines. All the same, Everett really does not seem altogether at home in his skin as Professor Higgins.
Honeysuckle Weeks as Eliza in Pygmalion.
As for poor Eliza, Honeysuckle Weeks is – whether by intent or design, I could not tell – almost impossible to understand in the early passages, and the cut glass accent in later acts is equally difficult to comprehend.
In the role of Alfred Doolittle, Phil Davis does a London-born shyster to perfection; well, almost. It has to be said that his predecessor in the film of My Fair Lady, Stanley Holloway, is a hard act to follow, and perhaps Davis would do well to soften up just a little at times.
Susie Blake plays Mrs Pearce with great skill, Peter Eyre is just right as Colonel Pickering, and Peter Sandys-Clarke must have been born in Freddy Eynsford Hill’s shoes. Candida Benson and Marty Cruickshank also play their parts with great skill.
The ending, however, of this adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion is quite disconcerting.
The Playwrights
As it happens, both Robert Tressell and George Bernard Shaw were born in Dublin in the second half of the 19th century, and both were socialists, but their lives could hardly have been more different than their interpretations of the world around them.
Tressell died unpublished and unrecognised; a pauper at 41. He was not recognised for his work on socialism until after his death, but gradually became something of a cult figure.
Shaw, who died at 94, was well-connected in The Arts, having earned a good living as a journalist and critic. He remains the only person ever to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938). He received the first for his contributions to literature, and the second for his work in adapting Pygmalion for film.
This production of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion at Chichester Festival Theatre is directed and designed by Philip Prowse, making his debut with CFT.
Book for Pygmalion or The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists here.
