Pygmalion

Review: Highly recommended is Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw. The characters of Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering in this, Shaw’s most enjoyable comedy, are so clearly influenced by Holmes and Watson that I have no hesitation in including this brief review. If you want more Sherlockian connections, Pickering is played by Geoffrey Palmer (Holmes in The Mask of Moriarty), Doolittle by David Burke (Jeremy Brett’s first Watson), and Mrs Higgins by Hannah Gordon (the second wife to Michael Williams’s Watson). The play is deliciously performed, especially by Lucy Whybrow as Eliza and Anton Lesser - not always a favourite of mine - as Higgins, and John Tydeman’s direction keeps it moving at just the right pace. Thank heaven, Mr Tydeman and his cast respect the artistic and psychological rightness of Shaw’s ending, so crassly perverted by Alan Jay Lerner (and by Pascal in the generally excellent 1938 movie): Eliza does not come back to Higgins. As Shaw said, that would be ‘a revolting tragedy’. Shaw gave his reasons in a fascinating epilogue to the play, here read in its entirety by Denys Hawthorne, who also provides brief narrative links taken from Shaw’s stage directions. This Pygmalion is simply delightful.

Reviewed by: Roger Johnson, [District Messenger 220, 2002]