One shy valve
DAVID PRYCE-JONES
The Truth About 'Pygmalion' Richard Hug- gett (Heinemann 42s) Success in the theatre, like LSD, seems to do something unaccountable to the brain-cells. Perfectly nice men and women, hitherto hardworking actors, dramatists or managers, regress in proportion to the enlarging of their names on bill-boards until they become so many children bouncing into the air the coloured balloons of their egos. Of all critics, their balloons uninflated year after year, Bernard Shaw must have suffered most, watching for so long across the footlights the unlimited company of vanities. Joining them, he made up for lost time. His public persona boils down to a shriek: 'I'm much more important than you. I promise you.'
The first production of Pygmalion gave Shaw his critic's revenge. He could hope to pop at least two big rival coloured balloons, both of them floating away into the social ionosphere, Mrs Pat Campbell and Sir Her- bert Beerbohm Tree, in the parts of Eliza and Henry Higgins. His boasting and his
sarcasm, ideal pins that they should have been, did not exactly' work. Rehearsals at His Majesty's Theatre during the early months of 1914 had a burlesque quality far surpassing art. Tree refused or was incap- able of doing what Shaw directed, con- stantly advancing into heroic fantasies of his own. Mrs Pat, miscast and no longer young, threw tantrums which carried all before her. She blipped Tree on the head with a slipper, she got a stage-hand to reflect that Mr Patrick Campbell was a fortunate victim of the Boer War. Every bit a star, her chosen weapon against Shaw was a sentimentality so flirtatious that even Shaw realised how she was blowing into his ego-balloon.
Five days before the opening night, Mrs Pat vanished. She had run away to marry George Cornwallis-West, a Guards officer whose previous wife had been Lady Ran- dolph Churchill. She reappeared however, from East Grinstead, in time for the final dress rehearsal, complete with furs and flowers and Pinky Panky Poo, her pekinese. Publicity reached a crescendo which any press agent or trendsman would do well to study. For no sooner a bride than Mrs Pat had to say 'not bloody likely' on stage. Scan- dal and outcry about morality put Pygmalion on the right road, to end up in Mayfair Lady as the box-office queues pronounced it—in accents of which Mrs Pat and Shaw would have approved.
Shaw walked out of the first night. What else was to be expected? It is a strategy since brought to a livelihood by assorted viewsmongers who abuse society more and more and receive greater and greater re- wards for so doing. Shaw signposted the way. Some affectionate portraits of him— and Mr Huggett's is one—depict him as a
Heath Robinson machine come to life, crank- ing and spouting out steam from several pipes at once, while underneath is a dear little mechanism, simplicity itself, one shy valve and a bit of string. A television per- sonality, in short; a message created just a little too soon for the proper medium.
Mr Huggett's snippet of the Shaw story is most entertaining. A moment should be specially put aside in a bookshop, if no- where else, for studying the final photo- graph of Mrs Pat, a year or two before her death. Pinky Panky Poo has been re- placed by Moonbeam. Mistress and pekinese share the same expression, they are equally dishevelled and furry. Better a ridiculous coloured balloon than this.
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