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| Pygmalion |
GEORGE Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion has spawned so many musicals, films and TV programmes that it is easy to forget why the Herts playwright wrote it in the first place.
It was, of course, a reflection on a time when women were taking to the streets to fight for suffrage but yet to many men, women were malleable creatures who served limited purposes.
So it is refreshing to go back to George Bernard Shaw's roots with the Company of Ten which is putting on Pygmalion until Saturday in the Abbey Theatre in St Albans.
The story of Eliza Doolittle, plucked from the streets and transformed into a lady, is one of the greatest tales of modern times.
Her treatment at the hands of Professor Henry Higgins is so appalling that it is hard to believe that it represented the attitude of many men to women less than a century ago.
But from the audience's point of view, it is great entertainment with the newly-gentrified Eliza only too well aware that to her mentor she is no more than an experiment in social engineering.
What the play needs above all is excellent performances in the two leading roles - and it has them.
Tim Hoyle is the pedantic and irascible Higgins for whom Eliza is no more than a toy to be thrown aside when he has won his bet with his fellow academic, Colonel Pickering.
But it is Katy Byrne as the flower-seller Eliza who becomes a lady who steals the show - as she should in all good productions.
Katy is at her finest in the richly comic Act Three when she gets her first opportunity to demonstrate her new "skills" at the home of Higgins' mother - a forward-looking woman who can see the iniquity of what her son is doing.
As Eliza mixes her old and new personas, she both enchants and horrifies her fellow guests - and Katy rises to the challenge brilliantly. Nothing that follows or precedes it is as good as that act.
Singling out the two main protagonists does not in any way detract from many other fine performances. George Edkins is very believable as Eliza's dustman father Alfred Doolittle and David Stone is a gentlemanly Colonel Pickering.
Beverley Robley, Chloe-Jane Dyson and Adam Dale are delightful as the snobbish Eynsford Hills and Ros Trinder is a knowing Mrs Higgins.
All in all, Pygmalion is an excellent production and a credit to director Angela Stone.
MADELEINE BURTON