TORONTO: In a multicultural and multiethnic world, such as exists in Canada, what should Juliet look like? Or Cinderella? Or Eliza Doolittle in Bernard Shaw’s much celebrated play, Pygmalion?
Why can’t she be someone of Chinese origin? Or of African origin? Or a Punjabi woman? Well, she is now a young vivacious Punjabi actress Harveen Sandhu, gloriously playing the role of Eliza Doolittle in a sumptuous production of Pygmalion at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Pygmalion, later, in its various incarnations, became one of the most loved musicals and a film, My Fair Lady, and became a classic parable for transformation, from a flower girl into a duchess, all through the demanding and rigorous efforts of Professor Henry Higgins by his training in ‘accent’ development.
Shaw was a thorn in the flesh of class-ridden England for over many decades. His plays are forever satirizing and ridiculing the middle class morality and the obsessions with proper accent of the English society. It is by judging the accent and speech of the speaker you place him or her on a certain rung on the social ladder, and then choose to make contact or not. Shaw observed famously: “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.”
In the preface to Pygmalion, Shaw wrote: “many thousands of men and women … have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue,” though few admit it. “Voice adaptation is still the original British sin. Monitoring and exposing such citizens is a national pastime, as popular as sex scandals and libel cases,” wrote Zadie Smith.
Eliza Doolittle is a lowly flower girl in the play Pygmalion. And thus she is at the very lowest rung of the social ladder. Can the Professor refine her accent? Can he pass her off as a ‘lady’, even as a duchess at a garden party of the Establishment?
Can he turn a rough stone into a diamond?
That’s the wager, and the Professor succeeds gloriously. Played with imagination and verve, Harveen Sandhu enacts Eliza both a lowly, inconsequential flower girl as well as a confident duchess. With Patrick McManus as the Professor, Sandhu’s slow, often grudging, but nevertheless certain transformation is charming and most credible.
This transformation has become over the last 100 years since the play was first presented something of a parable. Eliza is ‘transformed’; the Professor has won the wager. But what now? Can the ‘duchess’ Eliza now go back to the gutters as a flower girl? Does she have any place in the heart of the Professor? Was she merely ‘an interesting experiment’? How is she now to be treated: a flower girl or a duchess?
The moral of the play, if it can so called, is uttered by Eliza herself: “What makes a flower girl a ‘lady’ is not how she is behaves, but how she is treated.”
George Bernard Shaw was a very important presence on the cultural and theatre scene in England over many decades. But he was also a socialist and a philanderer, and a satirist. He combined all these interests and obsessions in his various plays.
The other play that draws all this at the Shaw Festival is ‘You Never Can Tell’. Shaw talked about it as a play about love as ecstasy and as terror. The play, directed deftly by Jim Mezon, presents a ‘the duel of sex’. Ahead of his times, Shaw explores the equality of sexes, the liberation and freedom of women, the joys and agonies of the institution of marriage, and the unequal power of men and women, as lovers and as parents. Shaw does this through a comedy of manners
Both of Shaw’s plays, Pygmalion and You Never Can Tell at the Festival reveal the excellence of theatre productions at the Shaw Festival.
(Prof. Sehdev Kumar lectures on “International Films and the Human Condition” at the University of Toronto. His forthcoming book is “7000 Million Degrees of Freedom”)
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