There's an almost iron-clad rule in the arts that creative artists who are highly praised and famous in their own lifetimes must go through a kind of artistic purgatory after death -- during which period their work is then scorned and derided as fuddy-duddy, old-fashioned, antiquated, or just plain out of date. At some much later date, the qualities which made their work so valuable in their lifetimes may come in for a fuller appraisal and then be deemed of high quality and worth again. This rule applies in the worlds of music, painting, sculpture, and all the stage arts, and the theatre is no exception.
It seems to me that George Bernard Shaw's plays are currently suffering through this artistic purgatory. Whether this is fair and reasonable or not, only a couple of centuries of further time will be able to fairly determine. But at the moment, it is fact. And it poses some interesting problems for his namesake Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Originally founded at a date when Shaw had the highest reputation in the English-speaking theatre world, second only to Shakespeare (and not even second to him, in Shaw's own mind!), a festival devoted to the works of this literary giant seemed like a totally natural development.
Tempora mutantur. As Shaw's works have fallen farther and farther out of public esteem, the Shaw Festival has necessarily had to keep changing and broadening its mandate. The results have certainly been intriguing, and often much more than just that. But the fact remains that Shaw himself has become so unpopular that his plays in recent years have more often been consigned to the intimate Royal George Theatre rather than the more spacious and capacious Festival Theatre.
All of which brings me around to the current production of Pygmalion, which the management has -- rather daringly -- placed back in the main stage space. I classify this as a daring move because the play itself has become largely unknown even to the bulk of the theatre-going public -- the ongoing popularity of the offshoot musical My Fair Lady notwithstanding.
The musical took this intriguing parable of male attempts to reshape women, and managed in the end to reshape the play itself as a more conventional romantic comedy. But that was not Shaw's intention, and he himself made that abundantly clear. To me, the reference which Pygmalion more often brings to mind is Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew -- a tale which similarly looks at a man in the process of moulding a woman to suit his ideas. But of course, both process and results are quite different in Shaw. The result is one of Shaw's oddest endings. The play just... stops. There's no sense of any final resolution of any of the elements in the story. Indeed, the outcome of the play is sufficiently uncertain that Shaw later wrote a lengthy prose epilogue outlining what he foresaw as the future of the Eliza-Higgins-Freddy triangle for many years yet to come.
So, then, to this particular production. I was concerned ahead of time about the Festival's description of this Pygmalion as being reimagined for modern times. That very ambiguous wording made me wonder just how much rewriting the creative team intended to do in Shaw's work and I wasn't at all sure I wanted to attend a production of Pygmalion if it were substantially altered. I must not have been the only one so concerned, as the Shaw Festival began advertising the show in June as having "not one word altered" from Shaw's original text! It certainly isn't necessary to alter Shaw's text as the issues with which the play deals -- issues of social standing and the language and behaviour which determines it -- are not really as far different today as many people thoughtlessly suppose.
(In practice there were a few alterations to words not currently in use such as "fire irons", to amounts of money specified in the text in order to bring them into a more realistic relationship with the present day value of money -- and one other much more noticeable change which I will mention below.)
With director Peter Hinton at the helm this was sure to be a bracing and invigorating reading of the play. This I expected. What I did not expect was that it would tilt so strongly towards the dark side, with the most actively disagreeable and nasty Higgins I have ever encountered, and with Doolittle played (in his first scene especially) as a very vehement and angry man rather than the affable philosopher so often depicted in this role in the past. It's all there in the script. What counts is the presentation of the material, with less of a nod and a wink than usual. None of which stopped people from laughing at favourite lines and moments.
One element of the production grated on me in particular, and that was Eo Sharp's glossy (literally), cubic, black and white set. Totally appropriate for Mrs. Higgins' home and studio (since she was reimagined as a couturiere), it struck me as completely wrong for Professor Higgins and his study -- particularly when that man had been portrayed as more than usually sloppy and slovenly in his dress. I admired the imaginative use of computers as a tool of his trade, but was grateful when I heard that a whole bank of TV monitors above the proscenium hadn't made their appearance due to the damage caused by a rain-in a few days ago. I like the idea of incorporating technology into the theatre in theory, but I also find that its easy to go to town and end up with altogether too many distractions from what is happening on the stage. Bad enough that actors have to compete with the multi-track minds of modern audiences, without also forcing them to fight against their own production for a share of the attention.
The opening scene of the play features a whole crowd of over a dozen street people with distinct and different personalities, modes of dress, voice and action. This scene was admirable for the clarity of the staging that kept the key characters visible when they needed to be without emptying the stage for their benefit.
Julain Molnar as Mrs. Eynsford-Hill was as crisp and neat as her very precise dress and hat. Her daughter, Clara, played by Kristi Frank, came across as the wannabe echo of her mother, but with an added veneer of what can only be called "stereotypical blonde." Clara's brother, the likable but somewhat vacuous Freddy, was well cast with Wade Bogert-O'Brien who has made something of a specialty of playing the likable, vacuous young male characters which litter the British theatre from the 1800s to the present day. For those thinking in terms of My Fair Lady, forget it: Freddy's part in that show and film was greatly amplified as part of the transition to traditional romantic comedy. In the original play his part is not large, and while on stage he does little but stare, goggle-eyed at Eliza and suffer the slings and arrows of his mother and sister.
In some ways the most thoroughly up-to-date character in the play was Higgins' housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce. As played by Mary Haney, she abandoned the politesse of the well-bred woman of the servant classes in the original in favour of a put-upon, frustrated, even petulant woman who has no problem telling it like it is. Her accent, understated but clear, underlined the difference in upbringing between her and Higgins. No difference in intelligence. This Mrs. Pearce sees much farther and deeper than her employer.
Colonel Pickering was played by Jeff Meadows as a pleasant gentleman whose politeness to Eliza didn't always match her description of it -- it was as if he turned his manners on and off like a bathroom tap, an intriguing approach to the part.
Peter Krantz played the dark, unconventional Alfred P. Doolittle to which I referred earlier. His imposing stature and booming voice abetted the impression of an angry man, and the anger came right into the open on his last words to Eliza in his first scene. In his second appearance, his facial expression took on the mournful look of a starving bloodhound as he described how his life was over, thanks to middle class morality.
Donna Belleville made a magnificent Mrs. Higgins, at once magisterial, concerned, caring, and incisive in dealing with her temperamental son. It was a prize performance of a prize role.
And this brings me to Harveen Sandhu as Eliza. This role poses exactly the same problem as the part of Lady Bracknell in Earnest: how in heaven's name are you supposed to come up with a way of playing it that doesn't make everyone think you're copying a famous performer of the past??? Sandhu's assumption of the character was fresh, brisk, and made much of the considerable mental and emotional backbone which keeps Eliza going through all her trials. This was, in fact, a strong-willed woman who was every inch a match, and more than a match for Higgins -- and how often have we seen her played that way? The final scene made that point painfully clear, as she repeatedly skewered him on the points of her forceful sentences.
I must describe her finest moment, because it highlighted an important point. Hinton chose to underscore the show with a wide range of different music styles at various points. Some of the underscoring continued into dialogue scenes and interfered with audibility of the lines. But there was one scene that reached a rare degree of emotional intensity. At the opening of Act IV Eliza roams around the room in her formal gown, having just returned from the ambassador's garden party (which in the original was an embassy ball, the sort of event that just doesn't happen anymore). As she moved slowly about, obviously trapped in a whirlwind of emotions, the opening bars of Vaughan Williams' Tallis Fantasia played. I would never have guessed, but it made a remarkably apt counterpoint to her slow, sad walking about -- an intense and beautiful stage moment indeed.
And certainly not least, Patrick McManus as Henry Higgins. As already indicated, this is a very sloppy, very casual Higgins, a man who feels quite at home sitting around in khaki shorts with his bare feet propped on a chair. His vehemence boils over at every opportunity. His behaviour towards Eliza goes beyond the unthinking and right into the actively abusive at times -- an impression which is part face, part voice, and part action. It undoubtedly gave her a good strong opposition to force her to draw out her own strength. But I can't help feeling there is more to Higgins' character than that. It was very difficult to take him seriously in the last scene when he spoke of having learned from her, and said that he would miss her.
These two strong characters undoubtedly struck sparks off each other, as they must, but each in turn descended into silly cartoonish foolery at times -- and that worked against both of their characters.
The language: in the first London performance of the play, Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza created an absolute sensation (and one of the longest timed laughs in the history of the theatre at 105 seconds!) when she uttered the legendary line, "Not bloody likely!" Hard for a Canadian audience to relate to just how offensive that word would have been in Britain in 1913, so this production very sensibly altered it to "Not f___ing likely!" The uproarious laughs ensuing proved the point.
All in all, I thought this was a good strong production of a play whose very familiarity disguises the traps that abound in the script. Some of the excesses worked against the performance. Sophisticated plays like this one, though, had much better never receive a perfect production -- because there would then be no point in anyone else taking it on again!
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