Classic brings class dynamic into the ‘age of startups’
Pygmalion
(out of 4) By George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Peter Hinton. Until Oct. 24 at the Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake. shawfest.com or 1-800-511-7429 As the audience files into Pygmalion, Henry Higgins, played by Patrick McManus, stands behind a window playing with his iPad as sounds of a rainstorm are heard. As the lights dim, he draws a question mark on the window’s condensation.
The most famous phonetics professor in theatre history is reduced to a punctuation symbol when he doesn’t have anyone to spar with. This is 2015, and the latest app will easily avoid any existential problems or melancholy.
Peter Hinton’s modernization of George Bernard Shaw’s classic play finds some thrilling cohesions between Shaw’s piercing of class boundaries in1914 London and modern-day life; just switch an early Higgins line from “this is an age of upstarts” to “this is an age of startups” and you’ve got today’s creative class, which compensates for lack of finances with cultural and social capital.
Hinton’s hipster Higgins doesn’t exhibit the traditional signs of wealth: he wears graphic T-shirts and shorts, rides a bike and has a beat-up bean bag chair in his study.
Rather, it’s his inept social propriety that gives his privilege away. Hobbies and techie toys explain his stunning lack of self-awareness, and he “man-spreads” all over the Festival Theatre stage and Eo Sharp’s slick, modern sets. McManus’s whirling dervish of self-importance and intellectual pomp will take up as much physical and verbal space as he wants, thank you very much.
By contrast, Eliza’s (Harveen Sandhu) crassness is louder and coarser but not totally unlike Higgins’s. As a result, his feeling of superiority seems particularly hypocritical and sexist but does take some power out of her transformation.
There’s something charming about Higgins’s casual smarts, however detestable he may be, so it’s genuinely heartbreaking when Eliza is completely ignored after winning his bet at the Governor’s Ball (in what’s rumoured to be the most expensive dress in Shaw Festival history) and her final plea for understanding is ignored. Sandhu, a rare example of Eliza played by an actress of a similar age, owns this role: the comedy, the independence, the softness and the rage.
Some aspects of the play are hard to translate from class-obsessed Britain to Canada, but Hinton’s demonstration of modern-day privilege is something North American theatregoers should notice and, frankly, feel uncomfortable about. And that does Shaw more justice than any Edwardian production ever could.