She begins the musical speaking convincingly guttural Cockney, and yowls when offended like a cat stepping on hot pins. It is time to jettison your image of Ambrose as sulky, perennially side-eyeing Claire Fisher in Six Feet Under, for which the actor received two Emmy nominations. Donald Holder’s lighting is never more sumptuous than in the light-blue drenching he gives the scene at Ascot racecourse. You can feel the coldness of the night as much as those poor, be-mittened working folk grouped around a warming fire. We also have the scene outside Covent Garden at the beginning when flower girl Eliza first makes herself known to Higgins and his more benign accomplice Pickering (Allan Corduner). It feels a little too far away from us, but it is impressive. The structure rotates to different parts of the house. Designer Michael Yeargan, tasked with filling the huge Vivian Beaumont stage, gives Higgins a beautiful home which advances out towards us from the shadows, a two-story cluttered marvel of books packed on to wooden shelves, and a gramophone. The Ted Sperling-led orchestra is rousing and ferocious, and also smooth and soaring. Setting cultural politics aside for a moment, the show is a beautifully mounted success. It’s not a question resolved by the surprise climax, or the appearance of a group of silent Suffragettes holding “Votes For Women” signs in the ensemble. This raises a more fundamental question: even with the corrective ending and its wonderful songs (lyrics by Lerner, music by Frederick Loewe), why stage My Fair Lady in the first place, especially in a year when men’s abusive treatment of women has been so center stage? Under Sher’s direction, you do not wish for Eliza and Higgins to be together you want her to get the hell away from him. Higgins, who Hadden-Paton presents at his most sniping, misogynistically vicious in Sher’s production, is the one who will come to regret not taking a lesson in manners. You want a man for her who has the intellect of Higgins but the heart of her younger love interest, Freddy.The “happy” ending that producers would try to fix to Pygmalion, and which My Fair Lady-originally staged in 1956-enshrined, with Eliza and Higgins together, has been jettisoned. I don’t think modern audiences would want Eliza to end up with any of the male characters. The song Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man? seems to me to emphasise that Pickering might be the perfect partner for Higgins, rather than that Eliza is not right for him, and you want them to live in a world where they could openly explore that.Īs for the show’s conclusion, it would be satisfying if Higgins met with a grizzly end, as described in the revenge song Just You Wait. You want Eliza to succeed and to win, but I found myself also wanting Higgins and Colonel Pickering to go off into the sunset holding hands. It feels like the very definition of a guilty pleasure, to listen to a tirade of sexist insults that includes language such as: “You squashed cabbage leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English language.” You dislike him for how he treats her but he’s hugely entertaining as a wordsmith, and when he expresses himself through song, thanks to Rex Harrison’s performance you like him even more. His treatment of her is horrendous, but the writer in me can’t help but enjoy his choice of words. He sets out to dehumanise Eliza by calling her a “presumptuous insect” or a “draggle-tailed guttersnipe”. He is awful to Eliza and not much better to his housekeeper, Mrs Pearce. On a rewatch as an adult, it’s clear Higgins has contempt for all women, except, maybe, his mother. A child may not have a nuanced view on Professor Henry Higgins’s treatment of women but is more likely to really enjoy Eliza shouting “ COME ON, DOVER! MOVE YOUR BLOOMIN’ ARSE!” Arse is simply a fantastic word for a female protagonist to shout, and that moment in the film is as joyful to me now as it was 30-odd years ago. Photograph: Kim HardyĮliza is not treated well by the male characters but as a younger person I don’t think the misogyny really registered. Amara Okereke, who will play Eliza in the forthcoming production at the London Coliseum, is said to have watched My Fair Lady 200 times.
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