PHONETICALLY PHABULOUS
Last time Bertie Carvel was on this stage it was as Donald Trump. Now our greatest shapeshifter is Henry Higgins: capering, swearing, someplace on the far aspect of manic, throwing out insults and seething with ardour. Though primarily for phonetics. Once he has picked up the milder Pickering he entertains him and us with an illustration of utmost vowel variations, ah, ae,ai, and a noise fairly presumably Sanskrit. The voice he chooses as his personal, by the way in which, has touches of Brian Sewell crossed with Prince Charles.
And if one explosive bodily efficiency was not sufficient, his Eliza (“Gaaaaarrrn!”) is Patsy Ferran: one other performer by no means knowingly upstaged. Ricochets around the stage as a ragamuffin, then dominates it with hard-won dignity by the top. As quickly as she agrees to his gutter-to-gentry experiment, we cool down very fortunately, and with numerous glorious laughs, to the well-known story of upward mobility by means of speaking correct.
Fascinating to be at this play simply after seeing its musical descendant, My Fair Lady (Frinton seafront, because you ask). For Richard Jones’ quick, spirited and gorgeously comedic manufacturing – choosing up just a few frills from the creator’s personal later screenplay – is an exhilarating reminder of how George Bernard Shaw hits you with out the softening of music: a rougher, gruffer ,verbose social contrarian. Many of the good strains have been rightly picked up by Lerner and Loewe, however a lot of the bracing sourness was discarded. Here the ultimate scene between Higgins and Eliza is electrically sharp in its Shavian fretfulness in regards to the unbridgeable social, ethical, political and emotional gulfs which lie between – nicely, nearly everybody, offered they’re needy sufficient. And John Marquez feels oddly trendy as previous Doolittle talking up for “the undeserving poor”and horrified at being by accident transported into respectability.
But the true glee – the sense that the Vic is unearthing this well-known fossil of English class bewilderment simply because it’s rattling good enjoyable – lies in fact in Carvel and Ferran. They milk each fantastic joke, Ferran particularly marvellous in her deadpan outbreak of “small talk” at Mrs Higgins’ tea social gathering. Mre H herself can be a deal with, Sylvestra le Touzel relishing each sarky maternal rebuke and apart.
The set by Stewart Laing, amusingly, is not parlour-play literal however bordered with old school audio system and people Ryvita-tiles utilized in radio studios. The costumes too are notably eloquent: Mrs Pearse in a lab coat and Eliza first in bundled raggedness, then in a gymslip and as her diction improves a night robe, draped a la Greque in order artfully to remind us of the title’s fable. And her final outfit when she rebels, is sensible, its muted buisnesslike tan shades echoing Higgins’ personal perennial brown go well with . They’re twins. She even finally ends up as a stern phonetics tutor.
oldvictheatre.com to 28 Oct
ranking 4
