Pygmalion
By Bernard Shaw
Directed by Sam Pritchard
Designed by Alex Lownde
Geej Ower – cinematographer
An NST, Headlong, West Yorkshire co-production
NST (Nuffield Theatre Southampton)
Tuesday 25th April 2016, 19.30
CAST
Alex Bennett – Professor Higgins
Natalie Gavin – Eliza Doolittle
Liza Sadovy – Mrs Higgins
Rachael Ofori – Clare Eynsford – Hill
Raphael Sowole – Colonel Pickering
Ian Burfield – Alfred Doolittle
Gavi Singh Chera – Freddy Eynsford-Hill
Flamina Cinque – Mrs Pearce / Mrs Eynsford-Hill;
Bernard Shaw always gets extra kudos from me as the benefactor of The Society of Authors. Every production of a Shaw play benefits the Society, and Pygmalion, in its My Fair Lady guise is the most important part of his estate. I have sat with the intimidating bust of Shaw behind me in the house he donated, whilst negotiating with publishers. Apparently, he overawes them.
You really should read Shaw’s play texts. He went into exquisite detail. In Pygmalion we are told that Eliza’s room cost four shillings a week rent, and contained a birdcage “but its tenant died long ago.” Then she has an “American alarum (sic) clock” and “a portrait of a popular actor.” Moving on to Mrs Higgins’ room, we read that
“There is a portrait of Mrs Higgins as she was when she defied the fashion in her youth in one of the beautiful Rosesettian costumes which, when caricatured by people who did not understand, led to the absurdities of popular estheticism in the eighteen-seventies.”
We should not read that as Shaw the control-freak (though he probably was), nor as one taking sideswipes against things he disliked (which he certainly was doing) but as an early example of what the Method was doing in the 1950s in having actors elaborate on the “back story” of a character. That’s the reason we were told to read Shaw in Drama courses … he was not popular in the theatre in my 20s and 30s.
Pygmalion is a surprise revival, in that the musical My Fair Lady so thoroughly eclipsed it in both its stage and film versions. Popular culture knew all about Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, and for a few years “Pygmalion!” became a popular minced oath. Professor Higgins is a Professor of Phonetics, and like Shaw is obsessed with minute details of language. The preface to the play contains one of Shaw’s most famous quotes on accent and social class:
It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.
Higgins’ ability to distinguish origins to within a few streets by accent is plausible to me … certainly at that time in the early 20th century. In my teens, I could clearly distinguish Bournemouth from Poole accents. Bournemouth was the edge of the South-East accent, and definitely Hampshire, while Poole, just a few steps across one road, was the edge of the South-West accent and definitely Dorset. That was blurring in the 60s, and is now gone. My dad could distinguish areas within Bournemouth … Winton versus Boscombe. Kinson, a few hundred yards from my birthplace in Northbourne, was the source for folklorists exploring English folk and Romany songs. The Romany mush was the standard and mildly aggressive Bournemouth version of ‘mate’ or ‘pal’ in my childhood. People stayed in their neighbourhoods, each of which had its own set of cinemas and dance halls. Bournemouth was shifted into Dorset in the early 70s.
This co-production can ignore Shaw’s detailed costume and set descriptions, because it is set in the modern day. The play is not just a period piece about making a Cockney flower girl sound like a duchess. Shaw’s point above still holds true. We might laugh at (or despise) Ali G’s white rapper convoluted Multicultural London English (Is it coz I’s black?), or the slow Dorset vowels around my home, or Prince Charles’ Advanced RP that turns house into hice. The question for a modern version should not be replicating Shaw in tracksuit bottoms and trainers, but in finding the relevance of his story today. Professor Higgins believes he can distinguish 130 different vowel sounds rather than the 22 listed by dictionaries for learners. There are variations on the “central” sounds listed indeed.
Listen to the strangulated Advanced RP of early 1950s radio and TV announcers, which has long been replaced by milder regional accents. Recordings of the Queen’s annual Christmas message are a treasure trove for linguists as her Advanced RP gradually moderates towards standard RP. The younger royals all use aspects of Estuary (the English of the Greater London area). However, a really strong and unmoderated regional accent is still a barrier to comprehension for those from other regions, as well as a social marker. We all moderate accent to help strangers understand us, and the call centre operator in incomprehensible Glaswegian or Mancunian or Geordie betrays not regional pride, but rather lack of sensitivity to listeners from elsewhere. In schools, a foreign accent is also a barrier. Are accents and dialects “all equal” as the quotes in the programme suggest? Or would kids benefit from approximating more to an RP norm? Big questions. Important ones for the kids of East European fruit pickers in a Lincolnshire primary, or the kids of African and Syrian immigrants in London schools. Normally kids will pick up their peer group accents instead of their parents’ accents. Not always … I know of two friends of my kids who were born in Dorset, but speak with their parents’ Northern accents. That’s unusual. Thirty years ago, Afro-Caribbeans from Liverpool had Liverpool accents. Those from Bristol had Bristolian accents. Now many strive to sound as if they’d been born in Jamaica. Strong accents, militantly strong ones, may create barriers. Has standardization got an argument going for it?
Shaw would have admired the technology in the play, I suspect, even if he disliked what they did with it. In that preface he adds:
A complete representation of the play as printed for the first time in this edition is technically only possible on the cinema screen or on stages furnished with exceptionally elaborate machinery. For ordinary theatrical use the scenes separated by rows of asterisks are to be omitted.
The production sets out to emphasize artifice. A wooden barrier with a long central slot obscures the set. We hear actors being told to read it in whatever accent is natural from behind the barrier.
Then they come out and the opening scene is played standing in a flat row. The lines have been recorded in a variety of accents, and are played back while the actors mime mouth movements, with the text projected above them. The recorded lines may be speeded up or slowed, and often make an incongruous match in tone, gender or accent with the actor mouthing along to the recording. OK, an interesting idea, which takes us through the first scene where Eliza’s flowers (she is a flower seller in Tottenham Court Road) are knocked to the ground and they realize that Professor Higgins is standing watching and making notes on their accents. It made a point, but it probably went on longer as a device than it needed to. The same issue cropped up in both filmed pieces of Eliza, which were projected. Fine, but both went on too long. Part Two opens with the sound of a garden party with how do you do repeated, with heads glimpsed through that slot in the front barrier. It makes the point well, but is at least four times longer than it needs to be, so becomes irritating. Possibly deliberately.
After the “recordings” beginning scene, we switch to film of Eliza in a taxi, again quite long. The film shows her arrive in her room, where she proceeds to sing Wouldn’t It Be Lovely thus flashing us into My Fair Lady.
Higgin’s home laboratory: L to R: Mrs Pearce, Colonel Pickering, Professor Higgins, Eliza Doolittle . Projected film of Eliza. You can see around the set throughout.
The set accentuates the artifice, as we can see around it to the wings and struts propping it up. In the very last long (long, long) dialogue between Eliza and Higgins in Part Two, the lights are switched off on the set, but the “backstage” wings are lit around it. Eliza and Higgins stand in front of the platform stage in lighting from the extreme sides. OK, it’s a PLAY. We knew that. At other times, characters use a handheld mic … Alfred Doolittle, Eliza’s dustbin man dad, does it in front of the set platform as a kind of stand up (and very well too) while Eliza and Higgins freeze on the darkened set behind him. There are lots of incidences of playing around with recorded sound.
As it’s about accents, let’s note that Eliza’s accent is Yorkshire. This is doubtless a nod to the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, one of the three companies in this joint production, and where it started its run. Why not Yorkshire? Well, the text mentions of Lissom Grove, Tottenham Court Road and Hounslow is one reason. If I were updating the play, the accent I’d have gone for with Eliza, is Multicultural London English (MLE), the major growing accent, with interesting mixes of Estuary, Afro-Caribbean, South Asian and Southern Europe. For someone interested in Linguistics, it’s the screamingly obvious choice and a major missed opportunity. A Yorkshire accent has some virtues, but takes us back in time.
Also on accent, it’s hard to remove the towering presence of Rex Harrison from the role of Higgins. The interpretation here is more nervy than plain arrogant. Also in Part Two, this Professor Higgins drifts further and further from RP into the actor’s own accent. A couple of dropped H’s. Some slightly “off” vowel sounds. Yet again, in this production I was left thinking, ‘Is that deliberate or sloppy?’ His mother, Mrs Higgins, is straight RP. Not “Advanced RP” but edging that way. Both Colonel Pickering and Freddie’s RP accents sound fake and forced.
I’ll add that the set design with glass boxes is by Alex Lownde who designed The Nuffield’s Dedication last year, with glass boxes. The man has a career in Poole, where I live, throwing up more steel frame and triple glazed glass houses at seven figure prices. I’d guess judging from the co-productions of The Seagull and Spring Awakening in recent years that Headlong’s contribution is the artificial air (and a smidgen of pretentiousness).
This is Shaw’s funniest play by a mile. In around two hours, there was barely a titter from the audience. OK, it’s Tuesday night, the first night in Southampton (though it has been playing elsewhere and reviewed there). An audience of around 70 (I counted roughly) in a theatre with 482 seats is pretty cold for both the cast and audience. As ever, Southampton nowadays could not draw a full house for the Second Coming (a remark I’ve used before). Laughs beget laughs. Silence encourages silence. It was something to do with that constant air of artifice. The modern dress and electronics clashed with Shaw’s text … those formal “I shall …” lines sound odd and wooden. Again, I’ll assume the director wanted this artifice and for the actors to sound wooden and stilted. And they often did. There was little interactive feel. No emotion.
Even the long Eliza / Higgins ending was plain dull. That surprised us, because it has personal resonance. Karen came to England from Belfast with a strong Ulster accent. Her junior school teacher insisted she have elocution lessons, which is why she went on to study drama. She has always felt, as Eliza does in the play, that she lost something of herself when she lost her accent. A couple of years ago, we did the “taxi political tour” of Belfast. She told the guide her Belfast accent had been knocked out of her. “Did you start a fight, so?” he asked at once. She wished she could have retained that Belfast reaction.
The tea party before Eliza arrives: L to R Clara (Rachael Ofori), Prof Higgins (Alex Beckett), Freddy(Gavi Singh Chara), Mrs Eynsford-Hill (Flaminia Cinque), Mrs Higgins (Liza Sadovy), Colonel Pickering (Raphael Sowole)
Take the funniest scene in the play, where Eliza does a practice tea party with the professor’s mum, Mrs Higgins. It’s that wonderful Someone done her in / Not bloody likely scene where Eliza arrives and speaks in careful RP but lets her own … Cockney, because that’s what Shaw wrote … expressions into the conversation. It would make a cat laugh, and indeed that’s where we got the titters, but it was done very artificially, sound somewhat muffled from within the glass box, sitting in a fixed row. Eliza (Natalie Gavin) was fabulous in the scene and in delivering the lines. They bleeped the “bloody” twice, and I think “fucking” was under the bleep, which is the logical change in 2017. But it should have had us rolling in the aisles. It’s Shaw’s best comic writing. It under-performed.
Probably the funniest scene in this production was where the wooden barrier descends, Eliza and Higgins stand in front at either side and she tries to pronounce the projected words (she gets Keighley right, being from Yorkshire). Other projected words are amusingly modern and it sounds relaxed, semi-improvised and is a refreshing change from the style of the rest. However, some of his corrections were incorrect.
Eliza Doolittle(Natalie Gavin) in Higgin’s recording booth
I’d assess / guess that technology took over a disproportionate share of the production / direction effort. Not enough attention was paid to blocking, movement or actor interaction. And we had this major deliberate attempt to keep everything wooden / artificial / distanced. I don’t think I’ve ever knocked actors in a review, but unfortunately, only three fitted their roles for me … Eliza, Mrs Higgins, Alfred Doolittle.
Did it ring up relevant points about standardization versus cultural identity for 2017? No. A failure on that. It was still a flower girl in London being made to speak slightly Advanced RP, just as it was a century ago. In spite of all the recorded games it doesn’t update the central issues for me.
There is a strong concept. I didn’t take to it, (you may) and in the end, while there were interesting ideas with technology commenting on accents, I did not enjoy the performance. It’s one where the concept moves so far from the original play, that I’d prefer to fit the technology to a new play on the very real issues (let’s encourage new plays!) and leave Bernard Shaw as it was conceived.
OVERALL
**
OTHER BERNARD SHAW PLAYS ON THIS BLOG:
- Candida by Bernard Shaw, Bath Theatre Royal
- Man and Superman, by Bernard Shaw, National Theatre 2016
