Halligan’s interpretation is prone to its own middle-class moralising, intent on teaching Higgins a lesson where Shaw was adamant there was none, but it’s still Eliza’s moment of tragedy that hits home. The most fluent command of character and attention can be found among the lower echelons, where Tara Quirke plays Mrs Pearce as a housekeeper who really seems to rule the household, and David O'Meara, fantastic as the straight-talking schemer Alfred Doolittle, who finally becomes as much of a victim as Eliza to "middle-class morality".Īs ever, it is Shaw’s writing that works hardest to undo the verve of his play, where finally the endless back and forth of disputation resembles the author’s table tennis match against himself. But if director Liam Halligan’s production doesn’t nail the details, it delivers some fine expression. Smock Alley’s production attempts something of its own transformation, daring itself that a company of modest means can pull off a costume drama of linguistic wit and aesthetic precision. Shaw's title claims kinship with Greek myth, but this is essentially the story of Frankenstein with better elocution and slightly more screaming.
Thus begins a plot with which everyone is familiar: the observer, Henry Higgins (Paul Meade), is as immune to pleasure as he is to good manners his associate Col Pickering (Gerard Byrne) is an inveterate gentleman freshly returned from India and their experiment is Eliza Doolittle (Anna Sheils-McNamee), a Covent Garden "flahr gel" who will be turned outside in, transformed through speech, clothing and behaviour into a duchess. This is an age of upstarts, observes a man in the crowd early in Pygmalion, where anyone can become somebody else as long as telltale signs of speech and manner do not give us away.
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