Pygmalion Reviews – The Old Vic

"Patsy Ferran and Bertie Carvel are delightfully word-perfect in Richard Jones’s first-rate Shaw revival"

"From the start, director Richard Jones’s tremendous remastering of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912) is subtly spot on"

"Bertie Carvel is phenomenal – a more persuasive, acute and entertaining Henry Higgins never exercised his vocal cords."

"Ferran is at her most formidable in the second half, reconstituted as a subdued sylph in a classical gown – as if to demonstrate that the shift into the upper class involves embracing lifelessness (moving too much is vulgar)."

"Patsy Ferran and Bertie Carvel’s version feels magnificently modern"

'There is a deliberately extravagant quality to both performances to start, as if to emphasise the roles that the pair have assumed for themselves in a world of strict social stratification. This is in-keeping with the manic and deliberately over-played quality of Richard Jones’s production, which seems to suggest that this material cannot be taken entirely at face value. However all artifice and pretence are magnificently stripped away come the hard-hitting final scenes."

"There is immense power in the stillness and simplicity of the Higgins/Eliza showdown after she has won his flower-girl-to-a-duchess bet for him"

"A four-star adrenaline shot"

"Bertie Carvel and Patsy Ferran are fabulous in a sharp revival of George Bernard Shaw’s classic."

"... there is a thrilling, thin-ice energy to Richard Jones’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s play, a tension brilliantly embodied by leads Patsy Ferran and Bertie Carvel."

"Ferran and Carvel are a fabulous pairing, each capable of ridiculousness without becoming grotesque."

"Even if the propulsive staging means a little nuance in the relationship between Doolittle and Higgins is lost, their dialogues are remarkably moving, the artifice cracking open to reveal something sad and true."

"Extraordinary central performances from Patsy Ferran and Bertie Carvel"

"The two stars dominate amid a fine supporting cast, even if this is a weird choice of revival"

"I’m slightly baffled as to why Richard Jones chose George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 class-system satire for his latest, stylised revival, but it features two extraordinary central performances. It’s a joy to see Patsy Ferran bring her exquisite timing and elastic physicality to the role of Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower girl trained to speak and act like a duchess. Bertie Carvel’s transformative turn as her mentor and tormentor Henry Higgins will, I suspect, be a bit more Marmite for audiences."

"Jones’s theatre productions are always intriguing but can feel like magic boxes in which the actors perform like automata. Here the artificiality has been dialled back."

"I can’t think of another stage actor who changes as radically for each role as Carvel but his tour de force here left me impressed but unmoved. Ferran has a versatility of a different order."

"Shaw’s drama is still relevant but the staging is problematic"

"The pipes and moustaches of Bernard Shaw’s Edwardian England may have vanished, but there is still no shortage of opinionated men keen to tell women how to behave. Into this context strides Richard Jones’s new production of Pygmalion, with two superb actors at the helm"

"All this is illuminating and could, with actors this brilliant, be a moving and impactful production, stingingly relevant to now (coercive behaviour still dominates the headlines). But Jones’s production is pitched so high and loud that it is hard to engage with the points either he or Shaw are making. The action is highly stylised — cartoonish toffs, cut-out taxis — and delivered at breakneck speed. It feels weirdly empty."

"Patsy Ferran and Bertie Carvel don’t find play’s heart"

"This Shaw revival has wonderful moments but there is little spark between Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins"

"... how do Pygmalion’s class commentaries and critiques of mobility and morality speak to us now? It is unclear in this production, directed by Richard Jones, which does not unfold like a period piece exactly, nor a radical reworking, but wavers on the fringes of being a play with something to say to us today."

"There is fine casting... But together they can’t quite find Pygmalion’s beating heart."

"The play’s more ancillary characters are in some ways the most entertaining, especially Eliza’s dustman father, Alfred Doolittle (John Marquez), who sends up middle-class morality and sounds like a proto-Marxist. Eliza’s besotted suitor, Freddy (Taheen Modak), is entertaining, too, with his gurning smiles and bunches of flowers."

"Bertie Carvel channels Miss Trunchbull in an exhaustingly antic production"

"Patsy Ferran is a brilliant Eliza Doolittle – but this flamboyant production undercuts the key message of George Bernard Shaw’s classic"

"There are only two tempi in Richard Jones’s exhaustingly antic production of George Bernard Shaw’s play: fast and faster. Yes, I’ve sometimes wished that the verbose Shaw would hurry it up a bit, but this is like listening to a podcast at 2x speed."

"Bizarrely, Bertie Carvel brings back his high, mannered Miss Trunchbull voice for Higgins. Well, I suppose both are classic bullies."

"Thankfully, Patsy Ferran, who recently went toe-to-toe with Paul Mescal in A Streetcar Named Desire, transcends the pandemonium."

"All I want is a great production of Pygmalion"

"The dream team of Patsy "Streetcar" Ferran and Bertie "Matilda" Carvel unite for this thoroughly modern reading of the George Bernard Shaw classic that inspired the musical My Fair Lady."

"The unrelenting farce mode threatens GBS with GBH. Carvel, whose previous roles have included Miss Trunchbull in Matilda and an alarmingly convincing Donald Trump, plays Higgins like a cross between an overexcited child and manic maiden aunt."

"... the torrential pace gives us scant time to engage with the characters or care what happens to them."

"Despite interesting turns from Olivier winners Bertie Carvel and Patsy Ferran, this revival doesn’t make much of a case for the Shaw classic"

"It’s like Jones has put ‘Pygmalion’ under a magnifying glass and we’re all examining it. He’s not really changed it and he’s not casting any particular value judgement, he’s just enlarged the whole thing, so that what was once light comedy has become broad farce."

"Then we’ve got two amazing actors giving two very different, very detailed performances. The more obviously brilliant one is Bertie Carvel as a nerdy Henry Higgins."

"Ferran has drawn the shorter straw. So magnificent in her previous stage roles, including when she stepped in with two weeks' notice to play Blanche Dubois in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ alongside Paul Mescal, she has a harder time showing off just how good she is here."

"Patsy Ferran’s charisma shines bright in curious production"

"Bertie Carvel’s strange performance as linguistics professor Henry Higgins makes the George Bernard Shaw play feel even crueller than it already is"

"... staged in its original form with big stars Patsy Ferran and Bertie Carvel as the leads, this play is harder to love – somehow, it feels more obvious that its funniest lines are at the expense of a working-class woman who dares to step out of line."

"... Carvel delivers Professor Henry Higgins’s elaborate demonstrations of vowel sounds like oratorios, his rubbery face becoming a precision-tooled machine for the correct pronunciation of the English language. But outside these surreal, virtuoso displays, the artificiality and staginess of Jones’s approach feels grating."

"Stewart Laing’s ingenious set slides dramatically forward, offering a cinematic zoom onto Ferran’s face as she learns to swap her downtrodden flowergirl brogue for something stridently new. But Ferran’s performance is big enough not to need a close-up: she ricochets across the stage"

"... Shaw’s text is also suffused with warmth, one that’s obliterated by this chilly production"

"A production left with little to say"

"The problem for Pygmalion is My Fair Lady. The Lerner and Loewe musical sits on top of George Bernard Shaw’s original play like a glamorous hat, lending its familiar lines a jaunty gloss. And the problem with Richard Jones’ production of Shaw’s tale of Eliza Doolittle, the flower girl passed off as a duchess by phonetics expert Professor Henry Higgins, is that it seeks so hard to distance itself from the romantic musical interpretation it becomes brittle and heartless."

"This is a terrible shame because in Patsy Ferran and Bertie Carvel it stars two of the most interesting actors working today. Yet here the frenetic pace that Jones dictates means they become caricatures"

"Overacting drowns out the sting of Shaw’s comedy"

"... this Pygmalion played at pantomime pitch. True, the bittersweet final third of Richard Jones’s characteristically capering production finds some of the grace and sting excluded from the preceding hour-plus. Yet by then you’ve been shouted at for so long by outsized characters trying so hard to be funny that it’s almost as if a fresh play has started. It is a loud and insistent evening."

"You are grateful for the restraint of Michael Gould as Colonel Pickering, and best of all Sylvestra Le Touzel as an enjoyably acidic Mrs Higgins."

" I was swayed by some of the stiller moments once Eliza starts ruing her fate. Ferran looks far more comfortable. She and Carvel, their red and brown outfits now mirroring each other, are finally allowed the odd moment of connection."