A Bernard Shaw classic has become almost part of the furniture for the annual Peter Hall Company summer season at the Theatre Royal Bath. For 2007 the company has plumped for the play that has won the Shaw estate more dosh than all the others put together. The reason, of course, is the Lerner and Loewe adaptation as My Fair Lady. The non-musical version, however, allows greater focus on the timeless humour of Shaw’s social barbs, and Hall makes sure they are given full rein in this sparkling revival based on Shaw’s original concise text, excluding the extra scenes he wrote for a film made in 1938. The cast is ablaze with colourful character acting. It would be difficult to better Tony Haygarth’s loquacious Doolittle, Barry Stanton’s steadfast Col Pickering or Una Stubbs’ gentle Mrs Pearce. But it is the enduring relationship between Higgins and Eliza, straight-jacketed at first by convention but in the end breaking free, that floats or sinks any production. Here Tim Pigott-Smith and Michelle Dockery are a pure delight, with his overbearing, insufferable and only very occasionally vulnerable Higgins eventually brought to heel, if not completely tamed by her sparky determination to make something of herself. Dockery’s timing of some of Eliza’s put-downs of her mentor towards the end of the play mark her out as a comic talent to keep an eye on and are almost worth the admission price alone.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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