Review: My Fair Lady, The Questors Theatre

The 1964 film adaptation of Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady is surely the definitive version of one of the all-time greatest musicals. With a dozen witty and wonderful songs augmenting a script closely based on George Bernard Shaw’s superlative comedy of manners and morals, Pygmalion, the film also boasts career-best performances from Rex Harrison as bull-in-a-flower-shop linguistics professor Henry Higgins, and Audrey Hepburn embodying the pinnacle of female beauty as Eliza Doolittle, the aspirant commoner Higgins transforms through his dark arts of language. All subsequent productions inevitably invite comparison.

It’s a pleasure to report that this production at Ealing’s Questors Theatre absolutely holds its own next to its illustrious forebear. The songs, the laughs, the romance, the light touch upon serious social themes… all are wonderfully present and correct.

Need a plot recap? Tunnel-visioned Professor Higgins bets fellow toff Colonel Pickering that he can elevate “squashed cabbage leaf” Eliza from her lowly status as a Covent Garden flower girl by transforming her voice from a cockney squawk to a genteel lilt which could pass as that of a duchess.

My Fair Lady is basically Pygmalion with some of the denser speeches trimmed and some cracking songs added to give the theme of class mobility a delightful musical bounce. ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?’ enchants with its dream of simple pleasures, ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ soars romantically, and ‘Ascot Opening Day’ accompanies the well-to-do to the races in style – matched by designer Carla Evans’ exquisite costumes.

Higgins (Ant Foran) gets a clutch of brilliantly grumpy rants set to music, irritably asking ‘Why Can’t the English Teach Their Children How To Speak?’and ‘Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?’ Eliza’s dad, philosophical dustman Alfred Doolittle, has cheery working-class anthems ‘With a Little Bit of Luck’ and ‘I’m Getting Married in the Morning’.

In the latter role, Robert Vass has enormous fun ducking responsibility with a wise-sounding excuse for every dodgy ruse, while as Eliza’s smitten suitor, Luke Baverstock plays Freddy Eynsford-Hill as more than just a gurning fop, and gives an endearingly passionate rendition of ‘On the Street Where You Live’.

The whole ensemble are admirably skilled, but in a very strong pack Kirsty King’s Eliza is the undoubted ace. She masters the transition from flower girl to emergent social butterfly, bringing out unexpected and sophisticated nuances in familiar scenes such as Eliza’s first introduction to society and her climactic showdown with Higgins. The only question raised by King’s performance is: “Audrey who?”

Directed and choreography by: Michelle Spencer
Musical director: Tom Arnold

My Fair Lady plays at The Questors Theatre until Saturday 5 April.