Pygmalion review: Patsy Ferran’s charisma shines bright in curious production

Bertie Carvel’s strange performance as linguistics professor Henry Higgins makes the George Bernard Shaw play feel even crueller than it already is

Patsy Ferran and Bertie Carvel in the Old Vic’s ‘Pygmalion’ (Old Vic Theatre)

George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion zings with delicious, textured wit. Insults like “You draggled-tailed guttersnipe!” went on to lend bite to My Fair Lady, the rags-to-riches musical fairytale it inspired. But staged in its original form with big stars Patsy Ferran and Bertie Carvel as the leads, this play is harder to love – somehow, it feels more obvious that its funniest lines are at the expense of a working-class woman who dares to step out of line.

Director Richard Jones spends the lion’s share of his career staging operas, where he’s known for his bold, bright, witty aesthetic. Perhaps he was drawn to Pygmalion for the emphasis it puts on the human voice: here, Carvel delivers Professor Henry Higgins’s elaborate demonstrations of vowel sounds like oratorios, his rubbery face becoming a precision-tooled machine for the correct pronunciation of the English language. But outside these surreal, virtuoso displays, the artificiality and staginess of Jones’s approach feels grating.

His innovation is to go for a minimalist, 1930s-inspired setting that suggests a changing world – one where intricate Victorian social hierarchies are falling apart like moth-eaten lace. Stewart Laing’s ingenious set slides dramatically forward, offering a cinematic zoom onto Ferran’s face as she learns to swap her downtrodden flower-girl brogue for something stridently new.