In its preface, George Bernard Shaw claimed the success of his 1912 play was proof that all art should be “deliberately didactic”. But how do Pygmalion’s class commentaries and critiques of mobility and morality speak to us now? It is unclear in this production, directed by Richard Jones, which does not unfold like a period piece exactly, nor a radical reworking, but wavers on the fringes of being a play with something to say to us today.
There is fine casting in Patsy Ferran as the cockney flower-seller Eliza Doolittle and in Bertie Carvel as the imperious Henry Higgins, who takes on her transformation from Covent Garden “cabbage leaf” to duchess as if it were a science project (his housekeeper, Mrs Pearce, played by Penny Layden, even comes on in a lab coat).
But together they can’t quite find Pygmalion’s beating heart. Higgins is shown by Shaw to be a bully and mummy’s boy, although he is also egalitarian enough to treat a duchess as a flower-girl and vice versa. But in Carvel’s hands, he is irredeemably unappealing – an overgrown schoolboy, puerile and pompous, with a serpent-like darting tongue for added creepiness. Ferran plays Eliza with clowning spirit at first (thankfully she does not ham up the cockney accent) and the early scenes are close to farce, with exaggerated physical comedy. This tone is dropped but other stylistic tics bob up, none quite unifying.
The modern is placed alongside the historic in Stewart Laing’s set design: office tables with Henry’s period recording devices, minimalist drawing rooms with huge spotlights and walls covered with trendy geometric designs. Laing’s costumes are similar: Eliza seems to be in modern dress at the start while the others are in period clothing. The elisions of time and switches in tone are slickly executed but what are they trying to say?
Some of the dissonance is down to the play itself. Written in what the note-taker of the first scene calls an “age of upstarts” – a time of growing social mobility when the newly rich “give themselves away every time they open their mouths” – class and social mobility are no longer as sharply defined by accent alone. The production feels strangely like a museum piece despite its contemporary visual elements.
There are some strong moments, nonetheless, including a wonderful scene in which Eliza takes her first, disastrous stride into middle-class society at Henry’s mother’s house, where she accidentally, and delightfully, creates a “new small talk”. Ferran’s performance grows in power although there is no real fire between Eliza and Higgins.
The play’s more ancillary characters are in some ways the most entertaining, especially Eliza’s dustman father, Alfred Doolittle (John Marquez), who sends up middle-class morality and sounds like a proto-Marxist. Eliza’s besotted suitor, Freddy (Taheen Modak), is entertaining, too, with his gurning smiles and bunches of flowers.
Higgins is spotlit alone on stage at the end as Eliza walks away, his laugh hollow and self-mocking rather than the self-satisfied chuckle of Shaw’s stage directions. Yet Eliza’s assertion of her independence does not carry the force of other such self-defining women, such as Ibsen’s Nora. And while there is a certain commercial safety in reviving the most popular of Shaw’s plays, therein lies the danger: it seems a little too familiar, a little too safe.
• Pygmalion is at the Old Vic, London, until 28 October
