When Jerome Kilty was stationed in London with the US army during the second world war, he doorstepped George Bernard Shaw. The octogenarian playwright, he recalled, “received us cordially”. Kilty went on to become an actor and playwright himself, and Shaw inspired his biggest success – this 1957 two-hander drawn from the author’s ardent if unconsummated correspondence with Mrs Patrick Campbell, the original Eliza in Pygmalion.
Campbell’s magnificence is lost to memory, while Shaw’s plays slide from the repertory. Why bother with their antique sparring? This revival depends on feeling performances by Rachel Pickup and Alan Turkington as two outsize personalities skirmishing between courtship and combat.
The first act centres on efforts to stage Pygmalion. “I will be your pretty slut,” Campbell writes; contractual negotiations are all pang and flirt. Each is quick to pique: “I will sit here and howl,” Shaw snaps. “All I ask is to have my own way in everything.” Rehearsals founder on her misfiring Cockney accent and his intemperate direction, but the show triumphs.
We then watch their relationship fracture, especially when each attempts to mine their relationship in play or memoir. Meanwhile Shaw’s curiosity takes him behind the scenes at his mother’s cremation; his pacifism makes him furious rather than consoling when Campbell loses a son to the war.
A modern theatre-maker might navigate this material differently: scholars now frame Campbell as a psychologically acute performer rather than stroppy diva. Stella Powell-Jones’ production doesn’t always help a fusty script: touching when speakers gaze out, unsure how a letter will be received, but strenuous when she has the actors declaim at each other.
Calico-clad (with a cartoon of Shaw on Turkington’s T-shirt), the actors move between the cloud-stippled curtains of Tom Paris’s design. Pickup, chandelier earrings quivering in outrage, becomes touchingly still in old age; Turkington, petulant hands stuffed in his pockets, is easily wounded.
Desire shadows their exchanges (“I absolutely refuse to play any longer the horse to your Lady Godiva!”) – are they merely, as Campbell states, “lustless lions at play?” These two cantankerous artists are enrapt in each other’s imaginations – though Kilty’s play can’t quite shake off the cobwebs.
At Jermyn Street theatre, London, until 7 March
