George Bernard Shaw’s celebrated social commentary, Pygmalion, opens the new season at the Playhouse in the Courtyard Theatre where LEO OWEN caught the show

AS the source material for My Fair Lady, the plot of Bernard Shaw’s play is widely-known: a linguistics professor’s bold claim he’ll convince “polite society” that a common flower seller is a Duchess.

Celebrating one hundred years since the play was written, the Playhouse’s co-production highlights consistencies over the last century; the class system Shaw so obviously detested remains in tact and there is still sexual inequality, albeit less divisive. However, in the current digital age, the means by which theatre is able to explore and present this message has dramatically altered.

Headlong, WYP and Nuffield Southampton Theatres modernise Shaw’s text while continuing to straddle its original historical setting, cleverly highlighting constants like class. Voice warm-ups play as the audience enter and actors mouth sync with differing accents that don’t match appearance/ gender/sex to question how identity is truly comprised. Segments of dialogue are rewound or noted down by on-looking actors, reinforcing the idea of judgements and expectations.

A wooden stage cover with a slot across the middle conceals an otherwise often sparse stage and becomes a peephole into a different, rather alien, society before showing projections of Eliza on the move. Vocal training occurs stage front with subtitles and words projected onto the wooden cover. Higgins’ (Alex Beckett) mother’s house, represented by a greenhouse/conservatory, has become the glass bowl of society. Meanwhile, humour is created with expletives playfully door-belled over and a particularly lively rave style speech therapy track: “Say Your Alphabet”.

Aside from Eliza (played by Natalie Gavin and definitely the play’s “most absorbing experiment”), characters are difficult to feel empathy for with Higgins’ own mother (Liza Sadovy) openly berating her son. The show’s lack of likable leads arguably exposes where Shaw’s sympathies lay. Sam Pritchard’s modern take on a seemingly dated play depressingly proves Shaw’s concerns are just as relevant today and his clever contemporary direction just as thought-provoking for a whole new generation.

Pygmalion shows at the West Yorkshire Playhouse from February 9-25.