Table Talk: Bob Ellis on Film and Theatre

Andrea Demetriades is the only actress to have made sense of the first, whingeing-Cockney scenes of Shaw’s Pygmalion: she gives the shrieking termagant what Denny Lawrence, beside me, called a ‘sullen dignity’, a ferocity of aspirational bitterness and working-class spleen that motivates the rest of it.

But ‘the rest of it’, as written, is surprisingly thin, when compared with Alan Jay Lerner’s rather better libretto My Fair Lady: no Ascot Races, no Ambassador’s Garden Party, no confrontation with appalled royalty, no showy dressing-up in Cecil Beaton’s finest frippery, not even the arduous ‘rain in Spain’ montage (derived, it should be admitted,p, from Shaw’s Oscar-winning screenplay) in which she and her petulant Svengali work around the clock with blow-lamps, mouth-pebbles, metronomes, tuning-forks and Edisonian recording-devices rejiggering her vowels and pacifying her mutinous bad language; none of all that; goodbye to all that; just an under-characterised Higgins, a vacuous Pickering, an invisible Freddie (he speaks about ten words), one truly well-written character, Mrs Pearce, a lot of ill-motivated, flamboyant bickering, and no happy ending, and that’s it. ‘She’s going to marry Freddie!’ are the text’s last words, to which the director, Peter Evans, has added a video sequence in which he stalks her backstage and there either strangles or weds her; or snares her, maybe, into Shaw’s own curious ‘mariage-blanc’ (foreplay, cooked breakfasts and Fabian lectures on the economy), leaving her childless, furious, fuckless and thwarted as before.

One feels by the end that this is a first draft that not only needs work — which Asquith and Pascal and then Lerner and Moss Hart gave it, of course — but is also a kind of middlebrow cover-up of one of Shaw’s affairs with actresses: the one, perhaps, that he and Yeats were simultaneously fucking, if that is the right word for his first fresh ardent soggily-contracepted days as a philosopher-roue, of which Beatrice Webb said, ‘If Bernard Shaw ate meat, no woman in London would be safe’; and largely because of the fifteen-minute lovers’ barney that climaxes the evening, whose lacerous post-honeymoon woundedness (and verbal brilliance) can only have come from life. For he it is who seems to be cock-teasing her: domestic bliss my sweet sad bruised Lolita, but nothing between the sheets; just you wait, ‘Enry ‘Iggins, just you wait.

As Higgins Marco Chiappi is pretty good, tall, woolly-haired and crashing into the furniture — channeling, it seems, both Geoffrey Rush (whose voice he shares) and Robert Downey Junior’s unhinged coke-addict Sherlock Holmes;  with a whiff of Groucho Marx, perhaps — though he is not on my top ten castings of it (Rush, Hugh Grant, Stephen Fry, Colin Firth, Kevin Spacey, Dan Day-Lewis, David Warner, Michael Fassbender, John Waters, and Nicol Williamson now alas unavailable owning to death). He lacks the lofty-bohemian-scapegrace quality that led George Cukor to offer the part first, correctly, to Noel Coward, and then, correctly, Cary Grant, and then, correctly, and triumphantly, to Rex Harrison; fifteen years later it would been O’Toole or Plummer or Peter Cook. He lacks, like Downey, that touch of class.

Kim Gyngell is very fine — but too thin — as Pickering, and far too young; Vanessa Downing very good as the shabby-genteel Mrs Eynsford-Hill (with many more dull tea parties to get to that afternoon), Harriet Dyer superb as her daughter Clara, glitched by images of the free-thinking, foul-mouthed New Woman and the simultaneous imperative to hunt down a sleepy fat rich husband; and Wendy Hughes perfectly fine as Mrs Higgins, an inspiration, surely, for Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia.

And as Alfred Doolittle, David Woods … well…

He’s the first thin Doolittle, the first tall one, the first headshaven one, the first one presented as a gangster and, probably, hit-man, the first who seems not above molesting his daughter (when he hits her on stage it has Aeschylean force), and the first Mephistophelean one: I give you her soul to trifle with, and you give me, squire, five pounds. He makes it work, but he seems to have sauntered in from The Threepenny Opera or Assassins or Blood Brothers, disrupting the genial Ayckborne mood of the neighbourhood with rants against class and hypocrisy. It is rather as if Nicely-Nicely Johnson, instead of singing ‘Sit Down You’re Rockin’ The Boat’ began reading aloud with fury from Dawkins’s The God Delusion.

It sort of works. What doesn’t is the bare stage with dragged-on seats and tables and couches, in the Brechtian manner, and the chosen era, which seems to be about 2003, agog with computers and phone cameras but none of its costings adjusted upwards (Alfred sells his daughter for five pounds; three ha’pence is offered the flower-girl Eliza as a tip; a taxi-ride is thought an uncommon luxury), and there seems to be no consternation when two ageing bachelors adopt a teenage girl, burn all her clothes, dress her exclusively in kimonos, work her round the clock and pay her nothing (like an illegal Wetback immigrant in America) for her copious housekeeping duties — an arrangement, surely, that in any year after 1920 would have been looked upon with suspicion.

Nonetheless, it is worth seeing. Demetriades carries all before her and the wounding post-coital spat at the end has force that will last a couple more centuries. And it’s proof, I guess, if proof were needed, that a strong idea whose time has come, however flabbily dramatised — and the first twenty minutes are nearly as bad as the opening of Williamson’s Nothing Personal — will tend to prevail.

And change the world.