Pygmalion review: Patsy Ferran’s charisma shines bright in curious production

George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion zings with delicious, textured wit. Insults like “You draggled-tailed guttersnipe!” went on to lend bite to My Fair Lady, the rags-to-riches musical fairytale it inspired. But staged in its original form with big stars Patsy Ferran and Bertie Carvel as the leads, this play is harder to love – somehow, it feels more obvious that its funniest lines are at the expense of a working-class woman who dares to step out of line.

Director Richard Jones spends the lion’s share of his career staging operas, where he’s known for his bold, bright, witty aesthetic. Perhaps he was drawn to Pygmalion for the emphasis it puts on the human voice: here, Carvel delivers Professor Henry Higgins’s elaborate demonstrations of vowel sounds like oratorios, his rubbery face becoming a precision-tooled machine for the correct pronunciation of the English language. But outside these surreal, virtuoso displays, the artificiality and staginess of Jones’s approach feels grating.

His innovation is to go for a minimalist, 1930s-inspired setting that suggests a changing world – one where intricate Victorian social hierarchies are falling apart like moth-eaten lace. Stewart Laing’s ingenious set slides dramatically forward, offering a cinematic zoom onto Ferran’s face as she learns to swap her downtrodden flower-girl brogue for something stridently new.

But Ferran’s performance is big enough not to need a close-up: she ricochets across the stage, delivering furious exclamations of “Garn!” that leave no vowel unturned, restoring some of the shock that buttoned-up early 20th-century English poshos must have felt when exposed to a class of society they’d rather ignore. Her charisma shines brightest in a set-piece scene where she enthrals and horrifies a whole tea party, offering a glorious pantomime imitation of good breeding that sets the whole party stirring their tea in mesmerised unison.

Carvel’s turn is just as focus-pulling, but oddly repellent, too: his Higgins is nasal and strange, an emotionally distant alien who studies linguistics in a desperate attempt at understanding and integrating into human society. It’s a reading that makes the play feel even crueller than it already is, giving his fascination with Eliza a kind of vivisectionist’s detachment.

Pygmalion is an uncomfortable play, showing how two men pick a girl up out of the gutter and remake her to their liking as though she’s a doll – as Higgins’s mother (Sylvestra Le Touzel) adroitly comments. But Shaw’s text is also suffused with warmth, one that’s obliterated by this chilly production: the sense of an unlikely camaraderie between Eliza, Higgins and the charming, gentlemanly Colonel Pickering (Michael Gould), as they embark on the shared project of dismantling England’s rigid social hierarchies, one tea party at a time.

It’s a play that’s ripe for pulling apart and reimagining by a feminist director. For now, it feels like a curious thing: a glass showcase for Carvel and Ferran to fill with towering, uneasy displays of acting elan.