Pygmalion
Queensland Theatre Company
The Playhouse, QPAC
until November 27
by Carmel Audsley
Pygmalion - isn't it lovely
After being moved to the back of the year when the Summer floods devastated Queensland Theatre Company (QTC) in January, George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion opened at the Playhouse QPAC on November 8 to rapturous applause. And it was well worth the wait.
While some opening night patrons may have been expecting My Fair Lady without music, there was enough similarity between the Lerner and Loewe 1964 musical and play written in 1912 to keep them interested.
Shaw wrote the part of Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle specifically for his paramour and well-known actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, to point his finger at middle-class morality and class distinction.
Professor Henry Higgins (Robert Coleby) boasts that he can place an accent within a few miles of where a person was born. When he hears the bedraggled, guttersnipe Eliza (Melanie Zanetti) he decides to take her on as a project. He bets his chum Colonel Pickering (Bryan Probets) that in three months he could pass Eliza off as a duchess at a society garden party, by using his experience in the science of phonetics to train her voice and throw on a bit of window dressing by teaching her how to dress and behave. With his abstract, scientific methods, Higgins seems unaware that he is moulding a human being whose life will be forever changed, but three months is hardly time to prepare her for her new life in the real world.
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