Blooms with a view for pompous Henry

REVIEW: Pygmalion – The Swan Theatre, Worcester (Wednesday, October 14 to Friday, October 16).

Showtime! stars rating: * * * * *

WHAT a night and what a star… and didn’t the Worcester Rep’s new director guide the world’s best-known Cockney flower seller into being such a blossoming, blooming success!

The eternally irrepressible Eliza Doolittle in the company’s autumn production is played by Charlie Fraser-Swarbrick, now a Rep regular, and a sparkling performer who is rapidly gaining quite a reputation in this neck of the woods.

She’s an actor who never fails to wow the crowds – many will recall her fabulous performance in Northanger Abbey at the Commandery in July.

Since then, the company has been blessed by the arrival of new director Suzi Budd. And she’s taken George Bernard Shaw’s tale of upper-class mores and pretensions, given it a good old shake, and turned the effervescent Eliza into a force to be reckoned with.

Phonetics expert Professor Henry Higgins (Rob Holman) and his mate Colonel Pickering (George Ormerod) have gone slumming in working class areas, something the toffs used to do in those days. It is here that he alights on Eliza.

Higgins makes a wager with his pal that he can turn the Cockney sparrow into a bird of paradise by blunting her shrill regional vowels and turning her into a lady fit for polite society - and all within six months.

For these two, this is little more than an experiment with a human guinea pig. Little do they realise that their subject will in fact eventually smash her way out of the metaphorical test tube and give them both a lesson in justice, morality and – to use that contemporary term – perhaps female empowerment, too.

Holman and Ormerod are a sort of Edwardian buddy movie, had there been such a thing in those days. But their delicious pomposity and assumptions of being in charge are pricked by the arrival of Eliza’s dustman dad Alfred, who recognises a pile of pretentious old rubbish when he sees one.

Despite his professional calling, there are no flies on Chris Burrows’ character, a man who quickly realises that there’s a penny or two to be made from this weird and contrived set-up.

However, Higgins doesn’t entirely rule the roost, for constantly pecking away at him is his long-suffering wife. And it’s an absolute joy to watch Katherine Parker-Jones verbally dismantle her husband’s ivory tower, looking down her regal nose every time a turret crumbles. By jove sir, one doesn’t mess with her.

This production features a sterling cast and ensemble, especially bringing a sense of stateliness during the ballroom scene, in which Eliza is being put to the test of delivering her diction through a delicately sucked plum.

This being director Budd’s first outing with the Rep can only bode well for the future. Pygmalion is well worth seeing without a doubt - and blissfully recommended.