Musical with some weight to it

THERE was a palpable sense of relief as the curtain went up on Friday’s performance of this classic Shaw light drama.

At 4pm the company wasn’t sure there was going to be a performance, following the indisposition of John Branwell, who plays Alfred Doolittle.

A hunt round the theatre turned up James Quinn – most recently seen in The Pitmen Painters – who stepped into the costumes and on to the stage, script in hand, to fill in, much to the obvious relief of Mr Shaw (Kevin, artistic director, not George Bernard, sadly long since deceased...), and to the loudest applause of the evening for pluck under fire.

Everyone knows Pygmalion by the musical based on it – My Fair Lady, which it closely resembles in plot terms, though it also bears more than a passing reference to the story of Frankenstein.

The difference is that Shaw went for the class battle of the turn of the 19th century while Shelley was all about body parts. But in each case the subject turns into a self-determining “monster” (apologies to Charlotte Brimble, who is no monster as Eliza Doolittle) who breaks free of the limits imposed by society or, er, the grave.

As you might expect, this is a little weightier than any musical version, but for Shaw it’s positively cheerful, directed in a robust, amusing style by guest director (and former Library Theatre boss) Chris Honer on a realistic couple of drawing room sets by veteran designer Michael Holt.

The irascible, brilliant but thoughtless Higgins is played by James Simmons, who was good in Coward’s Private Lives here a while back and in some respects does a similar job – arrogant but amusingly clueless about women. His Higgins is distracted by his own brilliance and because he has a cheerful Pickering (Christopher Wilkinson) to bask in his glow, leaving an interesting dynamic between the two men and the “subject”, Eliza, who represents the rise of the common man in Shaw’s egalitarian outlook on life. As Eliza, Charlotte Brimble is a bit too strong with the guttersnipe act early on but blossoms into a regular “laidy”with charm and a feisty attitude. The support actors are a bright and enjoyable ensemble.

If the play had been written today, of course, sentimentality would have got its way, Shaw would have got Higgins and Eliza together and the audience would have gone home happy. What he did do was make the ending ambiguous. Such is life... PG