Marry Freddy? Not bloody likely!

It seems like I’m having a bit of a George Bernard Shaw fest this year, what with My Fair Lady a few weeks ago, the premiere of Pam Gems Mrs Pat, earlier in the year, and now Pygmalion at YTR, which I wanted to see as a companion piece to the other productions.

Now, I like Shaw, although his popularity has waned a lot, apart from the musical hybrid. I like his ‘wordiness’. His characters talk (and boy, do some of them talk), I like The Devil’s Disciple, Heartbreak House, and I’m fond of early plays such as You Never Can Tell.

When I saw MFL the other week, my main disappointment was the actor playing Higgins, who I felt lacked charisma. Well, in the current production of Pygmalion at YTR, Higgins is played by David Leonard*, and he has charisma in spades. He also has exactly the right sort of clipped tones for the part.

It was fascinating to compare the productions - one a big budget lavish West End transfer with elaborate sets and a large cast, the other a rep production, with a small cast, doubling, and a minimalist set.

What I liked about this production was that it made absolutely no attempt to emulate the musical, indeed I felt some roles were intentionally underplayed to set them apart from the familiar images and intonations. If I’d found Amy Nuttall’s Eliza to be an uncanny impersonation of Audrey Hepburn in Act 2, then Sarah Quintrell’s Eliza was a million miles away from that, but she made the part her own. Somehow, without the songs, the characters seemed more human. Higgins was certainly more childlike, and Eliza an emerging modern woman.

The set was very effective with columns stage right and a huge double door stage left, which could be used for interior and exterior, and one of the most severe rakes I’ve ever seen on that stage with a darkly mirrored floor, reflected in a window that appeared to be suspended overhead. The production also used back projection, both to set the play in a framework of Shaw’s 5 Act structure, with title cards, and for images of particular scenes – particularly effective was a sequence of eyes watching Eliza at the ball.

Because the musical is so familiar, you forget that the play doesn’t have any of ‘the rain in Spain’ and the vocal teaching hardly features – and they never go to Ascot. But this Eliza and Higgins seemed more of a match for each other, in age and in temprament. The production stuck with Shaw’s original ending, which concludes with Eliza having left the stage, after telling Higgins that she is going to marry Freddy, and Higgins laughing at the very idea – ‘Marry Freddy!!’ It wasn’t popular, and Shaw rewrote it for the 1938 film, but it is nicely ambiguous. In my head, the play remains simply a scene short, and we just don’t get to see ‘Eliza…where the devil are my slippers?’

*York’s pantomime baddie, and one of the reasons I go back year after year. Very tall, very skinny, very gorgeous!