Stop meddling: Eliza Doolittle was always a strong woman

George Bernard Shaw was by any standards, not just those of his day, a feminist, subverter of conventional morals and political troublemaker generally. So to find an American producer taking it upon himself to rework one of his plays to turn the heroine into a strong woman is either redundant or silly.

What we’re talking about is a new Broadway production of My Fair Lady, which is based on Shaw’s play, Pygmalion. Admittedly, any liberties its director, Bartlett Sher, is taking with the musical pales by comparison with the way the authors of My Fair Lady played fast and loose with the original play. Yet Sher is going that bit further. He’s casting Lauren Ambrose, 40, the American actress, as Eliza, and Harry Haddenpaton, 37, as Prof Higgins.

At a stroke, the entire dynamic of the play is upended. Further, it’s being reworked to make Eliza seem less like the plaything of two older men – Higgins and his friend, Col Pickering – and more like her own woman. Oh, please.

If you want an enterprising woman who is very much in control, read Pygmalion as Bernard Shaw wrote it. There you’ll find Eliza described thus: “She is not at all an attractive person. She is perhaps 18, perhaps 20, hardly older… The condition [of her features] leaves something to be desired; and she needs the services of a dentist.” So, that’d be a radical suggestion: make Eliza less conventionally attractive, with bad teeth. Not Ambrose then.

Eliza, a Cockney sparrow if ever there was one, is young and vulnerable, but it is her youth that makes it all the more impressive that she’s lippy and indomitable. She needs to be young for her pluck to be so evident in using Prof Higgins – whom Shaw specifies as 20 years her senior – to transform herself. As for Eliza being a strong woman, Shaw explains why she doesn’t marry the Prof, as the musical suggests, but Freddy, her devotee. He “is young, practically 20 years younger than Higgins: he is a gentleman… loves her unaffectedly, and is not her master, nor ever likely to dominate her in spite of his advantage of social standing. Eliza has no use for the foolish romantic tradition that all women love to be mastered.”

In other words, Eliza is young, shrewd, and very much the author of her destiny, not the plaything of anyone. If Mr Sher wants a strong female heroine, he’s got one.

My mother has Parkinson’s disease and, as anyone who’s got it knows, the condition is infinitely variable. Some people have the characteristic tremor, some suffer from depression, most have mobility problems.

One of the lesser known symptoms is that your voice gets weaker. I’ve been reading up on the Lee Silverman method of voice training, which encourages shouting and singing. But it turns out that my mother got there already. During the night, I hear her singing to herself – often hymns. All by herself, she’s worked out that if you want to make your voice heard, sing. Listening to Nearer, My God, to Thee, not quite in tune, is curiously moving.

It’s fine to kiss on a first date.

We know, because Debrett’s says so. In a guide for dating for the over-50s, it observes that the modern courting period is shorter than it used to be. Who are they telling? It’s millennials who have hangups about consent. Older people make the most of their opportunities. read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion