Kenneth Hurren on being surer than Shaw
Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw, with Diana Rigg, Alec McCowen (Albery Theatre, London) Tonight We Improvise by Luigi Pirandello, with Keith Michell, Keith Baxter, June Ritchie (Chichester Festival Theatre) The reappearance in London of Shaw's Pygmalion, for the first time since the global triumph of My Fair Lady, inevitably revives the ancient argument as to whether Shaw really knew what he was about in declining — with what must seem to many a splendidly chararacteristic perversity — to marry off Higgins and Eliza. The prattle in the foyer of the Albery is of little else, for the performance — excellent though it is — is, of course, haunted by its musical spin-off. It can seem almost a wanton deprivation that we are denied the elocution lesson that glides blissfully into the trio, 'The Rain in Spain', and I am bound to admit that, while I am uncommonly fond of the little play, it might seem now curiously incomplete when such sentiments as 'Why Can't a Woman be More Like a Man?' and 'I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face' are not elaborated in song. Anyone who so regards it can only be baffled and dissatisfied by the abruptly anti-romantic ending, when the anticipated spoonful of cream turns out to be yoghaurt; but the play never, in fact, arouses the creamy expectation, and I am rather more certain than Shaw himself seems to have been that his own ending is the right one.
Shaw really wasn't at all sure, whatever the Shavians say. It is true that he composed an epilogue in Which Eliza, her florist ambitions financed by Colonel Pickering, marries Freddy; it is also true that he became somewhat testy with Mrs Patrick Campbell and Beerbohm Tree when, in the original production, their performances hinted teasingly at the imminent marriage of Eliza and Higgins ("My ending makes money," Tree wrote to him in justification, "you ought to be grateful"; to which Shaw replied, "Your ending is damnable: you ought to be shot"). Nevertheless, there is some significance — however small and wayward — in the title. I doubt if Shaw ever actually considered calling the play Boy Meets Galatea (for he was probably above such things), but he was aware enough that the Pygmalion of Greek legend fell in love with and married the woman he created, and it may be that he initially toyed with the same notion, deciding only later, as befitted a dramatist whose attitude to sexual matters tended to be either chillingly biological or nervously facetious, that Higgins's creative artistry should be wholly philosophical and didactic. A quarter of a century later, embracing a commercialism he had deplored in Tree, he was able to bring himself to write a 'happy ending: for Higgins and Eliza in the moving-picture version, which is evidence enough that he did not regard it as the absurdly ,capricious and feeble romanticism he had once so blisteringly condemned.
'
Looking at the play last week, though, and doing my best to banish from mind the counterinfluence of some of those tunes, I found the old conviction that Higgins and Eliza were the unlikeliest of marriage partners reasserting itself; and the director, John Dexter, is unwise to allow what looked very like an implicit touch of ambiguity about their future relationship to enter Alec McCowen's performance at the end. It is possible to think, then, that Higgins, belatedly, is in love with Eliza — and though that, in the case of almost any other man confronted with the enchantress that Diana Rigg has made of her, would be reasonable enough, in the case of Higgins it is not. McCowen gives the man, all things considered, a decent charm and an amiable awareness of his childish mother fixation, and the captivating Miss Rigg takes Eliza smoothly over the class barrier
with her newly acquired accent, .grammer and social graces, but Eliza's simple primary values, though in some sense refined and clarified, do not change. Higgins, unemotionally arrogant and intellectually patronising, does not essentially change either, and is not her man. Eliza would plainly find life with that 'Miltonic mind' intolerable. I like to think (for I am as comforted as anyone else by happy endings) that Pickering did buy her that flower shop and that it prospered and that she and Freddy are celebrating their diamond wedding in a nice little house north of the river, south of the park.
The thought, indeed, is so beguiling that I am disinclined to puncture the mood by commenting upon the opening show in the new Chichester Festival season, although it is promised at the top of the column. Tonight We Improvise may be in the same genre as the same author's Six Characters in Search of an Author but, on this showing, it is not in the same street. The original production in Germany in the 'thirties provoked a riot ("Everywhere I am pursued by hatred," said Pirandello,unreasonably).The Sussex crown were more civil, and their good manners deserve the reward of better things as the season goes on.
Previous page
