I’m slightly baffled as to why Richard Jones chose George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 class-system satire for his latest, stylised revival, but it features two extraordinary central performances. It’s a joy to see Patsy Ferran bring her exquisite timing and elastic physicality to the role of Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower girl trained to speak and act like a duchess.
Bertie Carvel’s transformative turn as her mentor and tormentor Henry Higgins will, I suspect, be a bit more Marmite for audiences. He’s an effete, manic demon with a Mr Punch leer and a strangulated (but perfectly enunciated) voice, hips jutting and shoulders slumped like a half-strung marionette. A play that’s ostensibly about speech involves an awful lot of body language.
