In a tiny room backstage at the Coliseum, Kennedy and Woodyatt are taking a break from rehearsals. “In his audition he had a cheeky twinkle perfect for someone like Doolittle, who is not going to follow any rules,” Sher says. She is an extraordinary artist.” The “countercultural” role of Alfred P Doolittle, Eliza’s father, is played by Adam Woodyatt. “It doesn’t always happen,” says Sher, “but it does happen if you are as special as Charlotte is. but the very fact of her colour also helps heighten Shaw’s argument about built-in social inequities.” For the touring production, Okereke’s understudy Charlotte Kennedy will take the lead role. For London, Sher cast the first black Eliza, Amara Okereke. The cast of the touring production, the one on its way to Dublin, will be different from the West End version. When Shaw wrote the 1938 movie, which won him a best screenplay Oscar, the studio was not happy with the unromantic ending. And I do that because I have two daughters myself and because I am trying to preserve Shaw’s rather brilliant intentions.” That she was going to leave, that she had her own agency and strength. I got to restore Shaw’s ending so it was really clear what was going to happen. “My good fortune was that I got to redo it. I think he had different problems to what we have now, in that there would have been very few options for Eliza at that time.” So he put a lot of work into what the ending would be. He was completely against the notion of theatre being used to create a false happy ending. “For Shaw it was an impossible thought that Eliza would go back to Higgins at the end. the position of women, suffrage, the class system.” The ending to the play was hugely important to him, says Sher. “Shaw was grappling with all these questions. ![]() “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”, he famously despairs in the song Hymn to Him.įor Sher, it was important to go back to Shaw’s original play, Pygmalion, inspired by the Greek myth about the sculptor who, despairing of real-life women, carved a “perfect” woman out of stone. In today’s world, he’d be cancelled before you could say “wouldn’t it be loverly”. So much has changed since Shaw first wrote about Eliza - women still could not vote when the play came out - but sit down to watch My Fair Lady now and it’s fascinating to see, in Henry Higgins, the kinds of behaviours and attitudes women still have to contend with, even if there are new names for it: toxic masculinity, gaslighting and - Higgins is a master at this - mansplaining. Shaw’s own genius in carving out Eliza’s story was in exposing issues around feminism, class and sexism in early 1900s Britain, skewering all of it with the kind of biting satire that still manages to resonate more than 100 years later. In October, the story of Eliza’s transformation from 'squashed cabbage leaf' to perfectly spoken high-society lady, courtesy of condescending phonetician Prof Henry Higgins, will arrive at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin And you often find that in these great plays by people like Shakespeare, or the great Irish writer Shaw, that characters like Juliet or Eliza are not only brilliant but actually kind of geniuses, much like the writers themselves.” ![]() She’s just extraordinary in how quickly she learns. Sher expands on Eliza Doolittle’s genius: “What Higgins didn’t realise to begin with, in his choice of Eliza, was that he had picked someone who was incredibly intelligent when it comes to her ability with language. ![]() In October, the story of Eliza’s transformation from “squashed cabbage leaf” to perfectly spoken high-society lady, courtesy of condescending phonetician Prof Henry Higgins, will arrive at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin. All summer it’s been playing in the Coliseum theatre in London’s West End. Described as a “wunderkind” of New York theatre, Sher is the man behind the Tony-nominated revival of the musical four years ago in Manhattan’s Lincoln Centre. He’s talking about cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle, George Bernard Shaw’s most famous creation, the woman at the centre of his 1913 play Pygmalion, which later became a sumptuous Broadway show starring Julie Andrews and, in 1956, a multi-Oscar winning Hollywood movie musical starring Audrey Hepburn. “Eliza is a kind of a genius,” says award-winning theatre director Bartlett Sher.
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