Shaw's Pygmalion at the Old Vic, directed by Peter Hall
©Tristram Kenton
I snuck into this because my friend Alan couldn't go; and I'm glad I was offered the spare ticket, because this production deserves the good reviews it's had. There's nothing flashy about it. Far from it. In some ways it's an aggressively traditional, 1913-style production, using the Old Vic stage to its fullest stand-up-and-beg potential, with curtain and lights down and something like Elgar - quite possible actually Elgar - playing between acts. Nor was there anything fancy about the way the play was presented. Tim Piggott-Smith did ramp up (I don't go so far as to say camp up) Professor Higgins's self-centredness into a complete boyishness, not incredibly but markedly. Benedict Nightingale in the Times thought he went a bit too far. Otherwise, parts were played straightforwardly and well. I'm not the first reviewer to say that Tony Haygarth spoke quickly as Doolittle, and once or twice I felt his most political and thought-provoking lines risked being lost; but ultimately there's no doubt this part came over as strongly as you would hope, so perhaps Haygarth and Peter Hall know something I don't. Maybe their approach stopped his speeches lapsing into sententiousness. The difficulty with Shaw of course is that sometimes what he writes is so long-winded and declamatory that modern actors need to work hard, and be clever, to make his work work with modern audiences. I realise David Mamet tell us we must simply trust the play and present what is written, but I can well sympathise with actors who feel that may not be enough with Shaw.
Michelle Dockery has been much praised as Eliza. My only reservation is that her appearance in the opening scene in Covent Garden is so much what we expect. All evening my friend Stephen and I thought it was difficult to keep My Fair Lady out of mind: when Higgins talked about women, we expected him to burst into song, just like when he spoke about being accustomed to Eliza. But in the first scene, for the only time, I felt that this production deferred too much to the influence of the famous musical and film. Eliza sounded more like Audrey Hepburn as Eliza than she did a London flower-girl. A shame, that. Overall, though, Michelle Dockery was very good. She did make this incredible part and incredible transformation credible, and her feelings in the final confrontation with Higgins were coherent and believable, the logical outcome if a real woman were put through this experience - more believable than Professor Higgins's feelings, arguably, though I blame Shaw for that rather than the cast. Where Michelle Dockery won the hearts of the audience was in the scene at home with Professor Higgins's mother: the first, faltering debut of Miss Doolittle the lady was a brilliant piece of comic theatre. It's a one-gag scene, essentially, and a familiar gag at that, but here Michelle Dockery really could trust Shaw, and the result was uproarious, tears-in-the-eyes stuff.
And what a welcome revival this is, of such an interesting political play. The worst thing about My Fair Lady - a terrific musical, don't get me wrong - is the way it has sugared and romanticised this story and put the social and the political in the background (I notice Michael Billington called the musical "sugar-candied": I promise I read his review after I wrote that). Dolittle is an especially important character as far as the politics is concerned, since his speeches are the ones that challenge and question, albeit in an ideologically incoherent, just vaguely leftist way, received social opinions and liberal wishful thinking of the early twentieth century (though Higgins's mother and housekeeper are also important characters, representing voices of dignified incipient feminism and of social conservatism). I've never seen a production before, but I remember when I read this play in the 1980s when I was studying political drama how similar to the German naturalists and others this play felt, technically and structurally (Michael Billington in the Guardian mentioned the Scandinavians, Ibsen and Strindberg), yet how much more politically diffuse it was, too. Shaw is I think more a gadfly political provocateur than, say, Brecht, who much more impressively fuses theatrical technique with ideas to produce a socialist drama. Shaw, on the other hand, sometimes feels like a bad imitation of a more red and engaged Oscar Wilde. Comparisons with German political drama are inevitable (for me at least), because of the theme - Brecht's Mann ist Mann also explores the possibility of changing a person's personality, as of course does The Good Person (or Soul) of Sezuan - but in a way the traditional presentation of this production forced those comparisons. The lowering of the curtain between acts gave the play a modernist feel: these were tableaux as much as they were acts in any classical sense.
How relevant to us today is Shaw's reworking of the Pygmalion theme? We live in a society now that is less divided by class markers like accent, breeding and dress than it ever has been - although as someone with a conspiciously northern English accent I do not for a moment minimise the effect on our lives of the way we're heard and the overtones of our speech. Our divisions today are more between the moneyed, vulgar though they may be, and the struggling, who may be quite genteel; between those who own houses and those who don't; between private and public sector workers; and between races and nationalities. I think a production that sought to bring out contemporary relevance might focus on the conspicuous consumption involved in kitting Eliza out in expensive frocks and shoes. More importantly, it would bring race into the room. Today's Eliza is black, she lives in South London, and she has a child. I have no problem whatever with a traditional production like this, but I also think Pygmalion could usefully be remixed and reworked by contemporary writers to hit us harder today. Perhaps one day it will be.
The other aspect of the play that can be neglected if we focus too much on class politics is what it says about the relations between men and women. In this area the play fits our 21st century Mars-and-Venusy preoccupations better, though some feminists might argue that this shows how far the backlash has driven us since the 1970s and 1980s. Pygmalion is partly about a woman's journey to independence by fighting against men of all classes who attempt to control her. But Eliza achieves that independence by conforming more to expectations of femininity than she had when she sold flowers. And she achieves it partly by becoming conscious for the first time of a desire to feel socially superior to a scullery maid. I couldn't help thinking of Ladette to Lady, the recent "reality" TV show which gives young female tearaways the chance to leave a self-destructive way of life behind to become finished debutantes. I think the show is far from funny, ultimately. You can reasonably object to it as suggesting women should fit an excessively traditional mould and simply be nice gels. Or you can see it as genuinely offering a life-changing opportunity to just one or two young women whose self-esteem rises dramatically as they realise they can have class if they want it, and can become their own Elizas or (like Pygmalion) sculptresses of themselves.
Oh, and the Old Vic could really do with a few dabs of WD40. The West End Whingers spoke too soon in May.
Have your say - join the discussion