Andrew Gillies (7/92 Pygmalion)
Excerpt from New York Times 7/26/92: Andrew Gillies
SUNDAY VIEW; Picturesque May Be Pleasant, But Is It Drama?
By DAVID RICHARDS Published: July 26, 1992
IN THE SHAW SHOP, THE OFFICIAL gift and souvenir boutique of the Shaw Festival, you can purchase the usual assortment of coffee mugs, T-shirts, trinkets and posters. I'm not against this. In these days of penury, a theater troupe needs every source of revenue it can get. You can also buy postcards depicting scenes from past productions. And I guess I shouldn't be against that, either.
But after seeing six of the nine offerings that make up the 31st season, I somehow find the postcards indicative of a worrisome development. The picturesque seems to have gained the upper hand in the three theaters the festival operates in this admittedly picturesque town on the no less picturesque shores of Lake Ontario. Little that's troublesome or unsavory makes its way onto the stages here.
....
Certainly not Shaw's "Pygmalion," which comes across in the Festival Theater, the company's flagship playhouse, as a perfectly genteel, although scarcely audacious, entertainment. If you think about it, however, Professor Higgins is not far removed from those mad scientists in old Hollywood films who were always trying to create life in a test tube or graft the head of a man onto the body of a wolf. Higgins's experiment, which happens to involve phonetics and a caterwauling Cockney flower girl, is no less transforming, and he puts Eliza Doolittle through all sorts of hell before she finally claims her remade self and walks out the door.
Andrew Gillies is pretty much a standard-issue Higgins -- rumpled, self-absorbed, arrogant, but not unlikable. He has nice spells of distraction, and a particularly telling moment at the end of the play, when, after cackling derisively over his pupil's impending marriage to another man, he grows pensive and regretful. You can see by his clouded brow that he's asking himself if the grand experiment was really such a wise idea after all. As Eliza, Seana McKenna is possessed of a certain sharpness, which she never entirely sheds, probably because it extends to her features. I know it's wrong to expect flashes of love between these two characters. (If you want romance, you have to look to "My Fair Lady.") Something warmer than diffidence on his part and animosity on hers would help this production, though.
Its salvation lies in the sets, which the designer Leslie Frankish has constructed with considerable ingenuity out of large wooden letters and words. One of the columns of the church in Covent Garden, for example, is made up of the letters C-O-L-U-M-N, piled on top of one another. The Art Nouveau filigree over the fireplace in Higgins's study is, if you look closely, the word "fire" and the word "place" intricately entwined. Some words -- "gossip," "tattle," "banter" -- seem to be hanging all by themselves from the rafters, like bats.
Ms. Frankish has two turntables at her disposal, one inside the other, so that when scenes change, language literally comes alive. Verbs are suddenly off and running; nouns are circling one another. You get the unsettling impression that a giant crossword puzzle has gone on maneuvers. It's an imaginative conceit and thoroughly appropriate. After all, hasn't Eliza ventured into a labyrinth of words? Wherever she turns, there's a perverse conjunction or a pesky adjective waiting to trip her up. You could say that "Pygmalion" is the story of how she makes her way out of the diabolical maze to safety.
Even if Eliza and Higgins don't kiss at the end, that story remains a good one. But what are we to make of "Widowers' Houses," the third Shavian offering, which the author described as "a grotesque, realistic exposure of slum landlordism"? Granted, urban housing practices haven't improved much since 1892, when the play was first performed. On the other hand, for all his righteous fury, Shaw isn't exactly in top form here.
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