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.
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.
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1926 | Broadway |
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1938 | Broadway |
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1945 | Broadway |
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1987 | Broadway |
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1991 | Off-Broadway |
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2004 | Off-Broadway |
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2005 | Off-Broadway |
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2007 | Broadway |
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2018 | Off-Broadway |
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2023 | West End |
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