Eliza Doolittle aspires to more than selling flowers on the streets of Covent Garden.
After a chance meeting with Professor Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering, she 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 and Tony Award-winner Richard Jones (Endgame, The Hairy Ape) directs the Olivier Award-winning duo of Bertie Carvel (The 47th, The Crown) and Patsy Ferran (Camp Siegfried, A Streetcar Named Desire) 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.
__Access Performances__
- Audio Described: Mon 16 Oct 7.30pm
- Captioned: Fri 13 Oct 7:30pm
- Relaxed: Sat 14 Oct 2:30pm
- British Sign Language: Fri 20 Oct 7:30pm
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.
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.
1914 | Broadway |
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1926 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
1938 | Broadway |
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1945 | Broadway |
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1987 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
1991 | Off-Broadway |
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2004 | Off-Broadway |
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2005 | Off-Broadway |
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2007 | Broadway |
Roundabout Revival Broadway |
2018 | Off-Broadway |
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2018 | Off-Broadway |
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2023 | West End |
West End |
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