Shaw Show Redemption

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The New York Sun

George Bernard Shaw made the same glorious mistake Brecht did in “Mother Courage”: He wrote a living character in spite of himself. The Cocteau Repertory Theater pulls off the identical trick with its production of Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” opening just this Sunday. The fact that the show will give you a crick in the neck still can’t detract from Shaw’s ripping good yarn; the production’s stuffiness just points the way for its genius.


G.B. Shaw has gotten considerable credit since his death, having been called by many the greatest English playwright since Shakespeare. On the other hand, in 1977, John Osborne sent an acerbic letter-to-the-editor characterizing Shaw’s plays as “posturing wind and rubbish. In fact, just the sort of play you would expect a critic to write.” Osborne was the standard bearer of the “angry young man” school, but he also had a point.


There’s no contesting Shaw had a staggering brain, the courage of the damned, and a keen eye for hypocrisy. But it can be quite difficult to watch his plays without a claustrophobic awareness of his stern, didactic hand. The man wrote incredible arguments, but his control sometimes stifled the life spark in his characters. One exception (even Osborne allowed it) can be found in “Pygmalion” – a play that only obeys its author up to a point.


In weird symmetry with the play’s own title metaphor, Eliza Doolittle popped off the stage and into the collective imagination. She became “My Fair Lady,” and directors from 1914 until now have been twisting themselves into knots, trying to give her a happy ending. She has delighted where her creator expected her to enrage – and you’d be hard pressed to find a character audiences identify with more.


So much so, in fact, her interpreters feel they know her better than Shaw did. Even the first production, directed by and starring Herbert Beerbohm Tree, defied the bleak, realistic ending and had the first Henry Higgins tossing the first Eliza a bouquet as the curtain rang down.


The Cocteau Rep production doesn’t have any such gestures – they work on the tiny stage under a tight rein. But the show stretches out.


The story of the Cockney flower girl who is taught to speak “prop-ly” by Professor Henry Higgins is like a familiar fairy tale, but with Fabian philosophy thrown in. Because of the romance we imagine budding, we can listen patiently to old Doolittle’s speeches on morality. Because we really want to drive them into each other’s arms, Eliza and Higgins’s final row over her independence transcends its own chalky lecturing.


Director Rose Burnett Bonczek keeps her actors well back behind the small proscenium, totally ignoring the 6 feet of stage closest to the audience. It’s to their credit, then, that Higgins (an aristocratic Jay Nickerson), Eliza (Kate Holland), and her wacky father (Angus Hepburn) are all completely audible. Though Ms. Holland has a massive character arc to traverse – from screeching alley cat to Emancipated Woman – she does so with grace. She plays the extremes broadly, but in the tea scene, when she balances between them, she is the pinnacle of Shavian.


Though Shaw was never one to write very sensually, Mr. Nickerson draws out every last drop from his description of Eliza’s “mouth, and tongue, and teeth.” Storming in his nut-colored tweeds around Michael Carnahan’s warm, handsome set, he makes his Higgins rough enough to sand Eliza smooth.


The production may not show boatloads of imagination, but it does show heart. Despite all the craning to see and hear, the audience stopped rustling altogether when Higgins and Eliza had their final showdown. Used to Hollywood endings, or at least Audrey Hepburn endings, it’s hard for us to believe that Shaw will really keep his jaw clenched against romance. The final moment of this production is, in fact, deliciously ambiguous on the point.


Here is where the production slips out from under Shaw’s iron hand. For all its intellectual meat, his unwitting, glorious accomplishment is in creating a world where the characters live on without him. After this show, you can’t help speculating on Eliza’s next step, and wishing her well.


Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, his first Eliza, wrote letters to each other for decades. The relationship was probably completely chaste, but the correspondence certainly wasn’t. (Shaw called her his “palm across the desert, my day’s wage, my night’s dream, my darling and my star.”) Her covert marriage days before the opening of “Pygmalion” was a bitter blow – and his insistence that Eliza be shackled to dull old Freddy Eynesford-Hill not only reflects the reality of their situation, but his revenge on it as well.


Ninety years later, though, his creation is still climbing down off her pedestal and wandering about the world without him – so perhaps she has had the last laugh.



Until March 27 (330 Bowery at Bond Street, 212-279-4200).


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