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PYGMALION

Michelle Dockery (Eliza) and Tim Pigott-Smith (Henry Higgins) in Pygmalion

Monday July 16,2007

By Paul Callan

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SOME roles could have been tailored with all the sartorial perfection of Savile Row for certain actors.

This could be said of Tim Pigott-Smith in the part of Professor Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, Shaw's classic satire on English class.

It calls for a booming arrogance, a ranting pomposity and a grand intellectual superiority.

And Mr P-Smith, as the irascible Higgins, delivers all that by the truckload.

His wager with fellow speech expert Colonel Pickering - a gentle performance by Barry Stanton - to transform the guttersnipe flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a vowel-perfect lady, is played with truculent polish.

The part is not easy - and is certainly not merely a matter of barking round the stage like some pesky bulldog. It calls for a delicate balance between the character's natural bad temper and the sensitivity that he strives to hide.

Michelle Dockery is superb as Eliza

Pigott-Smith, who made his name as the sadistic Captain Merrick in the television adaptation of Jewel In The Crown, achieves this balance with great skill. And at the end, when he sits forlornly alone on the stage crushed by the knowledge that a transformed Eliza has finally left his life, one feels quite sorry for the old bully.

Michelle Dockery is superb as Eliza - taking her smoothly on the journey from "squashed cabbage" to a lady of great poise.

She also brings out a touching steeliness, proving that she no longer needs Higgins in her life.

My only niggles lie with the make-up department and the scene-changing. Early, when Eliza is still a flower girl with an accent like a "cockney power drill", she is far too clean. Ms Dockery needs to be much more grubby. Also, the gaps between the scenes are too lengthy.

Audiences don't like waiting in the half light. A huge plaudit must go to the excellent Tony Haygarth as Eliza's philosopherdustman father Alfred. He brings a patter-song pace to the old conman, injecting hilarious moments to his rants about middle class morality.

One of the problems about watching this original version of Pygmalion is that the lyrics and music from My Fair Lady come flooding back into your mind.

Nevertheless, this is a fastmoving, hugely funny and touching production by the Peter Hall Company and deserves a West End airing. But this cannot be said of their stage version of Animal Farm, George Orwell's denunciation of dictatorship (farm animals rise up against humans but become a tyrannical society run by the pigs).

Having actors run around the stage wearing animal heads like hats does not work. But Stephen Casey is convincing as Napoleon, the porcine dictator, as was Tony Flynn as his cunning sidekick, Squealer.

There was a large party of schoolchildren present, and that is just where it works - as a teaching tool.

Theatre Royal, Bath.