Tuesday 24th February 2009
It may be almost a century old, but, according to Company of Ten director Angela Stone, Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion is still as relevant today as it ever was. Hence why the group has chosen the play for its spring performance at the Abbey Theatre this week.
Angela tells me: “You think women have it all now, and we don’t. When you see where we have come from, which is this period of 1912, when all the Suffragettes and Suffragists were fighting for equality, independence and respect, never mind the vote, you feel even today that Eliza’s fight for her own soul and integrity still really resontants.”
A comedic masterpiece, but also a clever satire on the superficiality of class distinctions, Pygmalion tells how Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, trains Eliza, a cockney flowergirl, to behave like a duchess and speak eloquently in order to win a bet. Featuring some of Shaw’s most-loved creations, including Eliza’s father Dolittle and the pretentious Eynesford-Hills family, this production became one of the playwright’s biggest successes and Angela jumped at the chance to direct it.
“I love Shaw very much and have done for years,” she enthuses. “The opportunities don’t come up that often to direct him, so when it did I plunged in.”
However, Angela, who gave up her course at the Guildford School of Acting in the ‘50s at the request of her parents to “earn a proper living”, admits her dream project has not been without problems.
“There were some severe intakes of breath over the staging,” she says. “Shaw loved stage machinery and it is a very complex play to stage, with six set changes in five acts. In fact, he said you can’t do the play unless you have the best stage machinery available but we haven’t. So the staging took a bit of sorting out but we think we have solved the problem with the help of some brilliant people who worked very hard.”
Thanks to Shaw’s talent, the ecclectic collection of characters brought to the stage are a real feast for the audience, but there is one in particular, who Angela has a soft spot for.
“In a way he dosen’t write any bad characters,” the director tells me. “But I have a a special fondness for Mrs Higgins, because Henry is, in many ways, a very difficult man with a snobby opinion of people, but his mother is a strong women.
“Shaw tells us she has decorated her house in the style of William Morris, who was one of the socialist artists of the time, and we are led to believe she is a socialist and I would suggest she is in fact a Suffragist. Her attitiude to Eliza is very caring but she is exasperated with the men objectifying Eliza and not treating her as a real person.”
As a keen amateur dramatist, Angela has previously been on the other side of the curtain for the Company of Ten’s past productions, but is suitably democratic when it comes to chosing her favourtie discipline.
“It’s one of those things, when I am directing I like directing the best and when I am acting, I like acting the best.”
But although Angela may be behind the scenes on this particular production, there is another Stone in the cast list – and that is her husband David, who will be playing Colonel Pickering.
“He is very good, but I treat him just as another actor. He gets just the same attention and a sterner note if he needs it, but I don’t discuss the other actors at home. I have worked for him when he was director and vice versa, and when we work together we like to keep it on an even keel.”
©St Albans & Harpenden Review 2009. Reproduced by permission.