PHONETICALLY PHABULOUS
Last time Bertie Carvel was on this stage it was as Donald Trump. Now our best shapeshifter is Henry Higgins: capering, swearing, somewhere on the far side of manic, throwing out insults and seething with passion. Though mainly for phonetics. Once he has picked up the milder Pickering he entertains him and us with a demonstration of extreme vowel variations, ah, ae,ai, and a noise quite possibly Sanskrit. The voice he chooses as his own, by the way, has touches of Brian Sewell crossed with Prince Charles.
And if one explosive physical performance was not enough, his Eliza (“Gaaaaarrrn!”) is Patsy Ferran: another performer never knowingly upstaged. Ricochets round the stage as a ragamuffin, then dominates it with hard-won dignity by the end. As soon as she agrees to his gutter-to-gentry experiment, we settle down very happily, and with a lot of excellent laughs, to the famous tale of upward mobility through talking proper.
Fascinating to be at this play just after seeing its musical descendant, My Fair Lady (Frinton seafront, since you ask). For Richard Jones’ fast, spirited and gorgeously comedic production – picking up a few frills from the author’s own later screenplay – is an exhilarating reminder of how George Bernard Shaw hits you without the softening of song: a rougher, gruffer ,verbose social contrarian. Many of the great lines were rightly picked up by Lerner and Loewe, but much of the bracing sourness was discarded. Here the final scene between Higgins and Eliza is electrically sharp in its Shavian fretfulness about the unbridgeable social, moral, political and emotional gulfs which lie between – well, just about everyone, provided they’re needy enough. And John Marquez feels oddly modern as old Doolittle speaking up for “the undeserving poor”and horrified at being accidentally transported into respectability.
But the real glee – the sense that the Vic is unearthing this famous fossil of English class bewilderment just because it’s damn good fun – lies of course in Carvel and Ferran. They milk every wonderful joke, Ferran especially marvellous in her deadpan outbreak of “small talk” at Mrs Higgins’ tea party. Mre H herself is also a treat, Sylvestra le Touzel relishing every sarky maternal rebuke and aside.
The set by Stewart Laing, amusingly, is not parlour-play literal but bordered with old-fashioned speakers and those Ryvita-tiles used in radio studios. The costumes too are particularly eloquent: Mrs Pearse in a lab coat and Eliza first in bundled raggedness, then in a gymslip and as her diction improves an evening gown, draped a la Greque so as artfully to remind us of the title’s fable. And her last outfit when she rebels, is brilliant, its muted buisnesslike tan shades echoing Higgins’ own perennial brown suit . They’re twins. She even ends up as a stern phonetics tutor.
oldvictheatre.com to 28 Oct
rating 4
theatreCat 