The 100th Birthday of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion: The Sydney Theatre Company Celebrates With Something Different
Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts
by George Bernard Shaw
Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay: 4 February 2012
continues in Sydney until 3 March
The Sydney Theatre Company
Director - Peter Evans
Set Designer - Robert Cousins
Costume Designer - Mel Page
Lighting Designer - Damien Cooper
Composer - Alan John
Sound Designer - Steve Francis
AV Designer - Sean Bacon
Dramaturg - Toby Schmitz
Voice & Dialect Coach - Danielle Roffe
Cast:
Professor Henry Higgins - Marco Chiappi
Eliza Doolittle - Andrea Demetriades
Mrs Eynsford Hill - Vanessa Downing
Clara Eynsford Hill - Harriet Dyer
Colonel Pickering - Kim Gyngell
Mrs Higgins - Wendy Hughes
Mrs Pearse - Deborah Kennedy
Freddy Eynsford Hill - Tom Stokes
Alfred Doolittle - David Woods
Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton as artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company saw fit to bring out a new, modern, almost experimental approach to Shaw's most popular play for its 100th birthday. To speak of the birth of a play, or any piece or performing art, is tricky. Shaw wrote the play in 1912, but the words on in the script are no more the play than those of a poem are the poem or a score the piece of music. Even in Shaw's case where the sounds of the words are so important and the characters' accents are all precisely set out — the drama depending almost as much on the raw sounds than their words' meanings — not to mention Shaw's preface to the play and his (I think purposefully prosaic) postscript-sequel, there is still room left for at least subtle variations in interpretation. With all these pieces of information specifying Shaw’s intentions and the precise and definite stage directions, the play is already especially alive on the page, but still much of the gestural and body language and movement, which is very important to language, is left open. For all this definiteness, the end is so ambiguous, and as a "romance", itself a very broad term, it is more akin to, say, Nathaniel Hawthorne's species of romance. From a character's point of view it is almost easier to find oneself in a tragedy and leaving one’s problems behind at the end.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!

