Eliza Doolittle rushes about on the steps of a Covent Garden church in the pouring rain: she has a wily look as she brandishes the flowers she is selling under the noses of sheltering bystanders. Her plimsoles are sodden and her little black hat has artificial violets round its brim; she is a nobody driven by darting, cartoon energy in Patsy Ferran’s brilliant embodiment of her. It matters to Eliza to be seen as “respectable” – almost as if she were anticipating becoming a somebody. From the start, director Richard Jones’s tremendous remastering of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912) is subtly spot on (even if the musical version, My Fair Lady, hobbles the play somewhat – you miss the singing). Ferran goes at the part full glottal stop as she collides with her future in the form of Henry Higgins, waiting for the rain to let up.
Bertie Carvel is phenomenal – a more persuasive, acute and entertaining Henry Higgins never exercised his vocal cords. He uncovers the defective complexity of the phonetics professor who decides, for a bet, to turn a flower girl into a duchess by teaching her the King’s English. His smile is gleaming, persistent and unhinged. He is socially gauche and unempathic (an irony, given that he is supposed to be teaching Eliza how to behave in society). He seems unable to think beyond his academic subject – and Carvel exploits this to hilarious effect. He wears a maroon jumper and brown trousers (he has no dress sense). He waggles his tongue like a gleeful reptile and speaks as if each sound were delectable ice-cream. He is not as interested in class as he is in the variety of accents and what they do. There is an unforgettable scene in which he manically lectures us on vowel sounds. At other moments he evinces a snobbish ecstasy, letting us know a Kentish Town accent is no basis for a successful future. There are bullying hints here of the other pedagogue that made Carvel’s name – Miss Trunchbull from Matilda.
