Review Roundup: Bertie Carvel and Patsy Ferran Star in PYGMALION at The Old Vic. What Did the Critics Think?

After a chance meeting with Professor Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering, flower seller Eliza Doolittle finds herself the subject of a rash bet to pass her off as a lady amongst the great and the good of London society.

Olivier-winner Richard Jones directs the Olivier Award-winning duo of Bertie Carvel and Patsy Ferran in George Bernard Shaw’s explosively funny, biting and subversive satire on class, as the ruthless linguist Higgins attempts to transform the brilliantly irrepressible Eliza – who breaks the mould he creates for her. 

Pygmalion has now opened at The Old Vic; so what did the critics think?

Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan

Aliya Al-Hassan, BroadwayWorld: The story of the cockney flower girl trained to speak and act like a duchess by a phonetics professor has two central characters that give the actors a huge amount to get their teeth into. The issue is that this production has a sense of detachment so we never feel like we get to the real heart of the plot or characters. Shaw's observations about class and social expectations are pretty much lost.

Nick Curtis, Evening Standard: Bertie Carvel’s transformative turn as her mentor and tormentor Henry Higgins will, I suspect, be a bit more Marmite for audiences. He’s an effete, manic demon with a Mr Punch leer and a strangulated (but perfectly enunciated) voice, hips jutting and shoulders slumped like a half-strung marionette. A play that’s ostensibly about speech involves an awful lot of body language.

Dominic Maxwell, The Times: You know the overacting is a choice rather than an accident because the production is led by two of the best actors in Britain, Patsy Ferran and Bertie Carvel. Ferran, the recent winner of the Critics’ Circle award for best actress as Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, looks lost amid the early overplay as a shouty, vigorously larky Eliza Doolittle.

Tim Bano, TimeOut: It’s like Jones has put ‘Pygmalion’ under a magnifying glass and we’re all examining it. He’s not really changed it and he’s not casting any particular value judgement, he’s just enlarged the whole thing, so that what was once light comedy has become broad farce. There’s barrelling, discordant piano music bringing a frantic mood to each scene change, and a cold, not-quite-real set by Stewart Laing of pink pegboard, with doors that open and slam shut with great regularity.

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage: The frenetic pace that Jones dictates means they become caricatures, with no breathing space to suggest depth or subtlety, relying on physical comedy and broad effects. Because they are such brilliant performers, they produce great moments of humour – but they are given no room to develop anything below the surface.

Sam Marlowe, The Stage: Ferran’s Cockney flower-seller Eliza arrives in an anorak and plimsolls, while Bertie Carvel’s raffishly obnoxious, staccato linguistics professor Higgins, who for his own amusement undertakes her transformation into a faux aristocrat, is powerfully reminiscent of Richard Briers in a 1970s sitcom. The opening scene, where they meet among West End crowds in a rainstorm, is a cacophony of overblown acting and frenetic movement: braying toffs, cor-blimey market traders, a trundling, toy-like onstage taxi. It is deliberately artificial – perhaps we are even being asked to recognise the social signifiers of theatre itself, with its ranked seating and exclusionary ticket prices.

Average Rating: 53.3%