I’m slightly baffled as to why Richard Jones chose George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 class-system satire for his latest, stylised revival, but it features two extraordinary central performances. It’s a joy to see Patsy Ferran bring her exquisite timing and elastic physicality to the role of Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower girl trained to speak and act like a duchess.
Bertie Carvel’s transformative turn as her mentor and tormentor Henry Higgins will, I suspect, be a bit more Marmite for audiences. He’s an effete, manic demon with a Mr Punch leer and a strangulated (but perfectly enunciated) voice, hips jutting and shoulders slumped like a half-strung marionette. A play that’s ostensibly about speech involves an awful lot of body language.
Jones’s theatre productions are always intriguing but can feel like magic boxes in which the actors perform like automata. Here the artificiality has been dialled back. The sets are rendered in fibreboard like an architect’s model, and the action has been kicked forward to a 1930s world of tubular furniture and anglepoise lamps. A hint perhaps, that smug certainties about class and gender are about to be shaken, if not swept away, by war.
Maybe Jones thought, too, that Shaw’s barbed view on social mobility chimed with our current experience of division and economic disparity. That it’s opened when male coercive control of women is headline news is an accident of timing. Higgins’ hectoring of Eliza, his obliteration of her self-respect, is uncomfortable to watch.
Both Eliza and Higgins seem child-like when they first meet on the steps of Drury Lane. She’s an exuberant free spirit, her limbs as uncontrolled as her boomerang vowels and dropped aitches. He’s a brat and a bully, in love with his own cleverness. Their early exchanges are tempestuous and very loud indeed.
Eliza’s grammar and pronunciation are corrected quickly. In the transitional scene where she tells a genteel tea party about a relative who was “done in” Ferran shows us Eliza’s spirit and swagger. At her “coming out” at an embassy party, she looks suddenly heartbreakingly frail and vulnerable, and we don’t hear her speak.
Choppy piano music and stark lighting power the show forward. There are fine supporting performances from John Marquez as Eliza’s reprobate dad and Sylvestra Le Touzel as Higgins’ exasperated mother. But it’s the two stars that dominate.
I can’t think of another stage actor who changes as radically for each role as Carvel but his tour de force here left me impressed but unmoved. Ferran has a versatility of a different order. She’s proved herself a transfixing dramatic actress in recent years but first wowed London audiences as a wobbly maid in Blithe Spirit, stealing the show from Angela Lansbury. This performance reminds us she’s got truly funny bones.
