Simon Ward Leaves West End PYGMALION Due to Illness

According to published reports, Simon Ward, who was set to play Alfred P. Dolittle in the West End revival of PYGMALION, had to pull out of the production because of a virus. While his understudy, Brendan Hooper, will replace Ward for now, an announcement is expected to be be made later today with the news of a new actor joining the show. The show is still on track to open on May 25.

The cast of the upcoming West End revival of PYGMALION starring Rupert Everett, Kara Tointon and Diana Rigg also features Peter Eyre and Peter Sandys Clarke as Colonel Pickering, and Freddy Eynsford Hill respectively. Marty Cruickshank and Roberta Taylor also star.  

The show is being directed by director Philip Prose, who also took part in the Chichester production. PYGMALION will play the Garrick Theatre through September 3.

Pygmalion is by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's gArden Party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a comment on women's independence, packaged as a romantic comedy.

In 1956 it was adapted into Broadway musical My Fair Lady, by Lerner and Loewe. The original production starred Rex Harrison as Higgins and Julie Andrews as Eliza