The ending of
My Fair Lady (differing radically
from its source, Shaw’s
Pygmalion)
poses a problem not unlike that of
The
Taming Of The Shrew: having been treated by Henry Higgins
for the previous three hours or so of playing time, at best, like a
lump of clay for him to re-model, how is Eliza Doolittle to play her
return to him? In Daniel Evans’ excellent Sheffield revival, Carly
Bawden and Dominic West face off against each other, silently but
knowingly, across the front of the Crucible stage. It is enough to
indicate that this is a match of neither delusion nor subjugation.
Lerner and Loewe’s musical is one of almost everyone’s favourites; we
set out to like it. Nevertheless, Evans does it full justice. He and
choreographer Alistair David are particularly strong on ensemble
sequences: one feels a genuine sense of community and a kind of
dance-banter among the denizens of Covent Garden market, to the extent
that at the performance I saw “Get Me To The Church On Time” drew a
mid-show standing ovation from some punters. This sense of playfulness
without mockery pervades the production: Paul Wills’ design makes use
of a motif of the great glass arch of Covent Garden, with the result
that Higgins’ library looks as if all those musty tomes and
wax-cylinder phonographs stand within a gigantic Wurlitzer jukebox.
The musical’s Higgins is less of an overgrown schoolboy than Shaw’s
original; although West enjoys the odd fifth-form moment he is never
puerile, and is intermittently rumbustious rather than persistently
like a bull in a china shop. He also treads an agile line between
singing and the Rex Harrisonian
Sprechgesang
we now expect in the role. As his colleague Col. Pickering, Anthony
Calf is a middle-aged gentleman rather than an elderly one; he seems
perceptibly younger than Martyn Ellis’s rotund, occasionally glowering
but still disarming Alfred Doolittle. What Bawden’s Eliza may lack in
captivating magnetism she makes up in vivacity and a fine voice.
Britons’ fondness for this tale, with or without songs, may (as I
observed on
Pygmalion’s last
major revival) testify to our continuing preoccupation with matters of
class; Evans and his company, however, purvey class of a different kind.
Written for the Financial
Times.