Eliza Doolittle aspires to more than selling flowers on the streets of Covent Garden.
After a chance meeting with Professor Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering, she finds herself the subject of a rash bet to pass her off as a lady amongst the great and the good of London society.
Olivier and Tony Award-winner Richard Jones (Endgame, The Hairy Ape) directs the Olivier Award-winning duo of Bertie Carvel (The 47th, The Crown) and Patsy Ferran (Camp Siegfried, A Streetcar Named Desire) in George Bernard Shaw’s explosively funny, biting and subversive satire on class, as the ruthless linguist Higgins attempts to transform the brilliantly irrepressible Eliza – who breaks the mould he creates for her.
__Access Performances__
- Audio Described: Mon 16 Oct 7.30pm
- Captioned: Fri 13 Oct 7:30pm
- Relaxed: Sat 14 Oct 2:30pm
- British Sign Language: Fri 20 Oct 7:30pm
It’s like Jones has put ‘Pygmalion’ under a magnifying glass and we’re all examining it. He’s not really changed it and he’s not casting any particular value judgement, he’s just enlarged the whole thing, so that what was once light comedy has become broad farce. There’s barrelling, discordant piano music bringing a frantic mood to each scene change, and a cold, not-quite-real set by Stewart Laing of pink pegboard, with doors that open and slam shut with great regularity.
The story of the cockney flower girl trained to speak and act like a duchess by a phonetics professor has two central characters that give the actors a huge amount to get their teeth into. The issue is that this production has a sense of detachment so we never feel like we get to the real heart of the plot or characters. Shaw's observations about class and social expectations are pretty much lost.
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