Director's Notes on My Fair Lady

Mr Anthony

Gabriel Pascal, the film producer originally responsible for adapting Pygmalion for the screen, first met George Bernard Shaw in the nude.

Sometime in the 1920s, Pascal was swimming without trunks on the French Riviera when he saw a skinny, naked man with a long white beard holding on to a buoy. Shaw commented on the golden brown of Pascal’s buttocks and Pascal asked, as a struggling film producer, if he might produce an adaptation of one of Shaw’s plays. Shaw replied that he would only grant such a favour if one day Pascal were 'utterly broke'.

More than a decade later, a nearly penniless Pascal rang the bell of Shaw’s cottage in Ayot St Lawrence. A maid answered and was told to tell Mr Shaw that the film producer with the brown buttocks had arrived. When Shaw appeared he did not recognise the visitor, so Pascal recounted their earlier conversation and insisted that they had a 'gentleman’s agreement'. Shaw interrupted him: “Young man, I am an Irishman and not a gentleman.”

Shaw fielded dozens of requests to adapt his plays into films and operettas; he was so horrified with the interpretation of his 1894 play Arms and the Man (as the 1908 musical The Chocolate Soldier) that he steadfastly declined all comers. In the case of his most popular play, Pygmalion, it seems the objections were financial as well as artistic: 'Pygmalion is my most steady source of income: it saved me from ruin during the war. To allow a comic opera to supplant it is out of the question.' Yet Pascal miraculously broke his resolve, with Shaw winning the 1938 Oscar for best screenplay as a result.

Shaw with his Oscar (and Nobel Prize medal)

After Shaw’s death in 1950, Pascal began to entertain the notion of a musical remake, but the tale seemed as resistant to reconstruction as the intractable Professor Higgins himself. Pygmalion was set mostly in a single study, with no opportunity for set piece chorus numbers and lacking a central romantic narrative, yet alone the B plot couple (typical in American musical theatre structure), whose antics offered comic variety from the more sophisticated liaison of the leads. Irving Berlin and Cole Porter swiftly declined; Rodgers and Hammerstein worked on the project for over a year before walking away confounded. It was Lerner and Loewe, fresh from their success on Brigadoon (the story of a mysterious Scottish village that appears for only one day every one hundred years) who made it their masterpiece. My Fair Lady changed the shape of musical storytelling, almost all of the show’s fifteen songs have become standards and by the mid-sixties, when the revenues from the various productions, recordings and film adaptation were calculated, the show had grossed just over six billion dollars in today’s money.

Indeed adaptation is the motif that runs through the narrative of My Fair Lady, in both its development and its final text. Shaw’s play had its roots in the Greek myth of the misogynist Pygmalion who, Ovid tell us, 'loathing their lascivious life, / Abhorr’d all womankind, but most a wife'. In spite of this, the sculptor carves a beautiful maiden out of ivory and, soon enough, pride in his project evolves into desire and a prayer to Venus, begging her to grant the statue life.

Shaw also found inspiration for Eliza Doolittle in Jane Burden Morris, the daughter of a stableman who became the wife of the notable Edwardian artist and socialist reformer Edward Morris, spending the second half of her life amongst London’s literary elite. No stranger to artistic transfiguration, Jane’s classless beauty had already inspired some of the most famous Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the 1860s, most notably Rossetti’s Proserpine.

Of course, the transformation undergone by Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady is purely superficial. The dependency of late Victorian and Edwardian England on what Pierre Bourdieu, the twentieth century social theorist, terms ‘social embodiment’ (how we absorb, from birth, a repertoire of speech patterns and bodily gestures which determine how we are ‘read’ and valued by a culture) is wittily explored through Eliza’s character arc, but this merely prompts an adaptation more profound. Higgins, under Eliza’s tutelage, learns to be human; solipsism and emotional immaturity (which he misinterprets as academic superiority) are slowly eroded by the sheer force of Eliza’s personality, ambition and intellect. He doesn’t give Eliza a voice, he simply facilitates that voice being heard by a society tuned only to a particular wavelength. It is a voice that, in all its phonetic guises, far surpasses Higgins’ in its honesty and perspicacious reading of human nature.

For whilst Eliza is held back by social conventions beyond her control, Higgins is stunted by a cowardly stubbornness entirely self-cultivated, and his ingrained behaviours (many of which could be classified under the contemporary term ‘toxic masculinity’) prove much harder to eradicate than a few vowel sounds and a temporary issue of deportment. In seeking to expose, through his linguistic interventions, the pantomime of class which English society holds dear, Higgins in turn exposes the pantomime of masculinity under which he proudly and pathetically labours.

At the story’s end, Higgins has only just begun to unearth a better voice, one moderated by compromise, kindness and self-scrutiny. It is a tentative process (notice how Lerner and Loewe place the word ‘yet’ on the climactic note of the final song: 'rather like a habit one can always break, and yet…') but I believe it is a process Eliza commits to, as tutor, in her altruistic return to Higgins in the closing tableau. Whether or not he possesses the strength of character for metamorphosis, as his protégé turned educator did, forms the piquant ambiguity of the show’s ending. For, as the American librettist and lyricist Michael Korie notes, My Fair Lady is 'the story of how we define our lives to ourselves, and of how much we dislike having that story disrupted by someone else.'

Mr Anthony's production of My Fair Lady opens on Wednesday 28th November, in the Pepys Theatre.  Performances on Friday and Saturday are sold out, but there are still tickets available for Wednesday and Thursday - so book now!