Pygmalion in Rehearsal, 3/5 – “King Enough For Me” – Part 1

Fresh from his undoubtedly barnstorming Barbican debut sabbatical, Dickon Farmer, the production’s Professor Henry Higgins, triumphantly returned to rehearsals, where the play’s last acts were just beginning to come together in earnest. In their incipient, unformed state, our proceedings took on a distinctly Brechtian sparseness. Through the artifice of theatre, a few lines of scotch tape gave us our metaphysical stage, with discarded, yet-unassembled kitchen roll tubes promised as organ pipes for set dressing in the future. So, too, with many of us still on book, and deeper character work still undone, was there a sense that identification and sympathy with the characters and action was significantly lower on the agenda than simply getting the words down – so that, fittingly enough, things were not yet familiar or obvious but instead stripped of their self-evident quality, reduced to an ephemeral representation of reality removed from reality itself, complete with nearly all the other common Brechtian trappings: harsh, bright lights, interruptions, direct address to the audience, and (just occasionally!) reading stage directions out loud.

With all else removed, subject to this enforced, Brecht-like estrangement effect, there was little left to me in this would-be Epic Theatre space but self-reflection, a critical view of the action on the stage, and above all, still in my exploratory phase, a sense that the space itself was not meant for veritable performance, but as a forum for the play’s charged socio-political ideas, where – indeed, after the styles of Brecht’s theatrical forebears Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold – the focus was far from manipulating emotions or creating any complacency-breeding catharsis, but instead on exploring the truth of the work’s impassioned socio-political content, and the broader context of the society and culture which produced the author and his work.

From left: Kevin Furness' Mr. Doolittle, Production Stage Manager Kejenne Beard, Dickon Farmar's Henry Higgins, and Director Emilia Teglia

Politically awakened in 1882, at 26, by a talk from famed Progressive Era economist Henry George at a socialist meeting at Memorial Hall, playwright George Bernard Shaw was inspired to fervent socialist activism, thence joining the reformist Fabian Society in 1884 and writing Fabian Tract No.2, the society’s manifesto, before year’s end.

It read:

“The most striking result of our present system of farming out the national Land and capital to private individuals has been the division of society into hostile classes, with large appetites and no dinners at one extreme, and large dinners and no appetites at the other”

Playwright George Bernard Shaw in 1914

Even here, long before Pygmalion’s 1912 completion and 1913 theatre debut, the young Shaw quickly proved himself a committed democratic socialist with an abiding disdain for the needless human suffering wrought by the stratified divisions of class. The play, today renowned as his magnum opus, is the culmination of a rich and varied lifetime of socialist thought and political action (including a stint in politics, which saw him attend the conference which birthed Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party and laid the democratic socialist foundations for our modern Labour), building on his own lifelong literary history of satirising conventions of love and class with 1894’s Arms and The Man, his first popular play, and shot through with righteously furious feminist oratory and an unflinching demand for a classless society.

Indeed, seemingly every word of Shaw’s dramedy retelling of myth is devoted to ceaselessly attacking the Greek figure of Pygmalion, reborn as Henry Higgins, the very incarnation and product of the worst excesses of upper-class mollycoddling, as a hideous, snobbish, misogynistic man-child utterly removed from anything resembling real life or meaningful human interaction with any human woman except his own exhausted and frustrated mother.

"Pygmalion and Galatea" by by Louis Gauffier (1761-1801).

Continued in Part 2.