Theatre
My Fair Lady (National) The Servant (Lyric Hammersmith)
Lady takes a wrong turn
Sheridan Morley
To start with the good news: the new Cameron Mackintosh revival of My Fair Lady is sharp enough and sturdy enough to return in some triumph to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane where it first opened more than 40 years ago. Mackintosh has rightly always been as much in love with old musicals as new ones, and this remains alongside West Side Story the greatest of its period.
I alone of my critical colleagues seem to have considerably more trouble with the idea of it returning to the Lane via the National Theatre, not because Trevor Nunn and his team have not done the show justice of a kind, but because I have always believed that a National musical must be one that is either economically unstageable elsewhere, or one that is drastically reborn.
Of the recent National musicals, Carousel passed that test with flying colours. but Oklahoma! remained just a commercial revival misplaced on a subsidised stage and so does this My Fair Lady.
Here, surely, was a chance for a real rediscovery: a black Eliza would have been no more unlikely or 'shocking' than the black Mr Snow in Carousel, and would have solved the problem that we cannot get ourselves back to a state of mind where minor public swearing is a deal-breaker. This could also at long last have been a
chance to look at the real possibility that the only human, apart from himself, Professor Higgins can finally bring himself to love is the unquestioning, adoring Colonel Pickering, richly and roundly played here by Nicholas le Prevost, who almost alone seems totally secure in his suppressed-gay characterisation.
Elsewhere, no real change on the Lyttelton stage: this remains a celebration of My Fair Lady rather than a reconsideration of it. Indeed Nunn's production plays far safer than the last Mackintosh revival of the show, 20 years ago, when in Alan Jay Lerner's own staging Tony Britton and Liz Robertson restored a lot of the hitherto cut Pygmalion text.
Of the new company, only Dennis Waterman as an unusually young and angry Doolittle manages entirely to banish memories of the original cast. As Higgins, Jonathan Pryee remains oddly and unusually underpowered and detached until the very last act when, as Eliza leaves him, he suddenly seems to pick up interest in her, the plot and its possibilities; until then, his is an intelligently melancholy portrayal, properly sung at last but deeply lacking Rex Harrison's lethal sexiness. Martine McCutcheon, the first Eliza to come in real life from the right 'wrong' side of the London tram tracks, is not yet the West End musical's long-awaited successor to Elaine Paige, but after a difficult first night she will I think grow powerfully into the role. Nunn wisely moves the period back to the 'Black Ascot' of 1910, thereby allowing all memories of Cecil Beaton to be banished, and Matthew Bourne's choreography here is brilliant, turning the bystanders into human horses, though in the ballroom he reruns his Motion Pictures' Cinderella, and in the Covent Garden scenes he allows a curiously weary predominance of chirpy cockneys from the Lionel Bart, Antony Newley and Leslie Bricusse musical school of about 1960.
Nunn's decision to play Karpathy as a buffoon also takes away a useful element of real danger, and elsewhere the period style is a little variable; watching Caroline Blakiston's spiky, splendid Mrs Higgins, one realises with a kind of shock that her predecessors in that role (Zena Dare and
Cathleen Nesbitt on stage and Gladys Cooper on film) had actually been alive and working at the time of the musical's setting. With that generation gone forever, it is as though a latterday company has to return to a very distant planet. All in all a qualified hit, but I suspect a very commercial one. It will nicely fill National coffers until it transfers, indeed is already totally sold out; future Arts Councils may however take the view that a National Theatre staging Noises Off and My Fair Lady and Singin' in the Rain and The Heiress within the same year and already muttering about South Pacific could maybe manage with a little less of a grant. Next year The Sound of Music and Murder at the Vicarage? I think, were I a purely commercial West End manager such as Michael Codron or Robert Fox or Bill Kenwright, I might begin to look more closely at the unfair-competition regulations, such as they are; the Grade Organisation was once busted, as was the old H.M. Tennent management, for drifting too far outside their original remits into neighbouring territory.
At the Lyric Hammersmith, we are in another uneasy time warp. When Robin Maugham's 1950s novella The Servant reached cinemas in 1963, it had everything going for it. True, it was the work of three great exiles: the director Joe Losey, on the run from communist tribunals in America, the screenwriter Harold Pinter, moving away from his East End beginnings, and the star Dirk Bogarde, on the run from J. Arthur Rank and yet another sequel to Doctor in the House. Add to that the sudden birth of Swinging London, as represented by the King's Road where the story is set, the first major screen performances of Sarah Miles and James Fox, a movie (much of it directed by Bogarde himself while Losey was in hospital) which finally began to learn from the grainy, black-andwhite arthouse films which the French and the Italians and Ingmar Bergman had just begun to export to us, and it is not hard to see why this closet-gay Upstairs Downstairs became an instant classic, albeit one which won almost no awards for anyone, so darkly threatening did its bisexual, class-warfare message seem to be. Just as England was falling apart in a tide of Profurno sleaze, so in one Chelsea household was the silver service suddenly under threat.
Almost 40 years on, what have we got? An extremely stylish, cutting-edge and very chic staging by Neil Bartlett, which unwisely abandons the Pinter screenplay of sexual and social reversal (which Rattigan alone would have done even better) to return to Maugham's original and far weaker story. In the title role, Michael Feast has just the right air of sinister, queeny obsequiousness, but Jack Davenport as his employer never quite captures the spoiled. Dorian Gray arrogance of James Fox, nor yet any awareness of how totally he has been destroyed by the man he brought in to do the dishes. You just can't get the staff nowadays.
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