Pygmalion
Of course the songs are missing from Shaw’s Pygmalion, but the play - for so long eclipsed by its musical successor My Fair Lady - is coming back into its own as a keenly observed social comedy about the claims of nature versus nurture in establishing class credentials, as a professor of phonetics turns a Covent Garden flower seller into a society duchess.
Rupert Everett (Professor Henry Higgins) and Honeysuckle Weeks (Eliza Doolittle) in Pygmalion at Chichester Festival Theatre Photo: Tristram Kenton
Peter Hall’s production for Bath Theatre Royal three summers ago, subsequently seen at the Old Vic, got the broad sweep of its angular comedy just right as well as the intricate social detail that grounds it, providing its own brand of muscular musicality even without the help of Lerner and Loewe.
Some of the rhythms of Philip Prowse’s production, by comparison, are off from the very beginning, not helped by Honeysuckle Weeks’s Eliza Doolittle whose cockney is so broad that it is virtually incomprehensible.
Those jarring notes continue as she transitions into a studied upper class woman, mangling her grammar and pronunciation, she’s still hiding behind something artificial.
It isn’t until the very last scene, when the emotional distance between her and Rupert Everett’s Henry Higgins is literally underlined by a geographical one as they sit on opposite sides of the yawning chasm of Chichester’s wide stage, that she finally establishes an authentic identity.
Meanwhile Everett - like a beaky, bearded version of Penelope Keith - fails to shade Higgins with anything more than alternate notes of petulance and pride at the success of his experiment in social re-engineering.
Prowse’s opulent, operatically scaled staging, which he also designed, is set against the backdrop of a rococo variety theatre, complete with peeling posters, that is much more like Hackney Empire than the Royal Opera House.
There is more welcome restraint from some of the supporting performances which include warm-hearted appearances from Peter Eyre as Colonel Pickering, Stephanie Cole as Mrs Higgins and Phil Davis as Alfred Doolittle.
Production information
- By:
- Bernard Shaw
- Management:
- Chichester Festival Theatre
- Cast:
- Rupert Everett, Stephanie Cole, Susie Blake, Phil Davis, Honeysuckle Weeks, Candida Benson, Marty Cruickshank, Peter Eyre, Peter Sandys-Clarke
- Director:
- Philip Prowse, who also designs
- Lighting:
- Gerry Jenkinson
Production information can change over the run of the show.
Run sheet
- Festival Chichester
- July 19-August 27 2010
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