A Personal Reflection on My Fair Lady

Performing once more in Sydney this year has been a re-run of the 2016 version of Lerner and Loewe’s musical My Fair Lady, a production directed by Julie Andrews, its original star, and featuring reproductions of the Cecil Beaton costumes. It celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the musical’s opening in London’s West End, after its triumphant 1956 season on Broadway.

The present revival, a romping treat for the eyes and ears, is true to the original 1950s sets and costumes. This adds to our sense of what is an interesting anachronism: Edwardian optimism through the prism of that other most optimistic of eras, the 1950s. The Edwardian era is shown to us through a musical “book” prepared for an audience in 1950s style. The refraction takes place through the already iconic Shavian tale of Eliza Doolittle, an ambitious but impoverished young Covent Garden flower girl, a raw-voiced Cinderella, transformed as a result of a bet between two Edwardian gentlemen into a beautiful and accomplished young woman readily passed off as a princess, metamorphosed by nothing more than a bath, some elocution lessons and a glamorous new dress or two.

I viewed it recently at a matinee performance in Sydney’s heritage-listed Capitol Theatre, a glorious Italianate confection of 1928 movie-going splendour, decked out with Roman statuary dimmed by the overall blue-green hues of the place. My last attendance there had been for Mary Poppins, another musical fantasy about escape from the strictures of Edwardian life. And now I’m here for My Fair Lady, a title chosen from the refrain of the traditional nursery song “London Bridge is Falling Down”, suggesting immediately an older order of things. For this undemanding musical feast, recommended for its wit and costumed extravaganza, representing a longing for a backward glance at a world of elegance now lost, busloads of matrons have arrived from the Central Coast to see it, dragging along a few reluctant males. They are drawn from afar as to no other musical, and no other performance; the audience for this anniversary revival has broken every Sydney box office record.

The attendees’ couture of the day showed a disconcerting range of fashion choices, from glitz luxe to plain and smartly tidy, right through to the occasional sneakers and ripped denim, for “matinee” competes with “smart casual” as an indecipherable dress code. At the entrances, these all-Aussie coastal female gaggles and many others milled around, jostling for space with international visitors, including a selfie-snapping quartet of chirruping young Chinese girls wearing fancy broad-brimmed and heavily-flowered chapeaux, honouring the occasion as they saw fit, posing in a serial cascade on the marble staircase.

The narrative of My Fair Lady derives substantially from George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 stage play Pygmalion, a deliberately transformative title, for the name refers to a Greek myth about a sculptor who brings to life Galatea, a female statue he has sculpted for himself, dreamed into warmth out of cold marble by his love for her. Shaw uses it to symbolise his theme that manipulation is possible in all things, including the received social order, although to me it hints that Shaw’s Pygmalion was a story about love, ownership, resistance and power from the start.

It is by no flight of fancy that the original poster for Pygmalion, later used for My Fair Lady and reprised for this Sydney performance, depicts a long-bearded Shaw as a Jehovah figure in the clouds, adorned with angel wings, but sprouting tiny satanic horns from his domed forehead. He is shown pulling the marionette strings of Professor Henry Higgins, the puppetmeister of poor strung-up Eliza Doolittle, who is dancing to the tune of Henry Higgins’s own lampooned misogyny. Neither is it any surprise that Eliza resists and wins out over such displays of masculine ineptitude in the end, and that their future together is left unresolved.

For Shaw was writing in a period of optimistic social change, in 1912, when an active suffragette movement drew women together across class barriers, and social horizons were expanding rapidly for everyone. Edwardians were shaking off Victorian chains. Social class mores and social mobility had become the objects of authorial musing about opportunistic escapes from class drudgery and the problems of coping with such freedoms; about escape from the self as well as from the power that others hold over you; and this escape was not just for women. Thus 1910 had already seen H.G. Wells’s character Mr Polly come confusedly up from under the dead hand of a career as a draper among the dreary lower middle classes, as unresolved in the end as is Eliza in her escape from the buoyant but seedy life of the workers of Covent Garden, who fail to recognise her in her new guise when she returns.

These two key intellectuals, Shaw and Wells, could still muse with optimism about class mobility through individual action within a firm social order, musings that were not yet shattered by the carnage so soon to come. Following that cataclysm, in the reworked post-war world with its hedonism, its dismays, its collective angers, erupting into the flaring Marxism and fascism of the 1930s, such individuated musings about rising through the unchanging social strata seemed almost redundant. They were scarcely to make a return in popular culture until the 1950s when, once again, opportunity knocked after struggling through the hard times of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Audiences wanted stories of hope and achievement once more, as seen in the rise of “the musical” as an engaging entertainment genre, on Broadway and then in cinemas, with My Fair Lady riding high on that wave. And more than that, the audiences wanted a happy ending after a vibrant chorus had sung them through the problems of the plot.

Times had indeed changed by the 1950s, so much so that the subtle suffragette assistances provided by Shaw once more struck a note with women seeking a way forward from post-war constraints, women looking for a new interpretation of themselves. Eliza herself, Mrs Pierce the housekeeper, and Mrs Higgins, Henry’s redoubtable upper-crust mother, still came across in the 1950s, as in 1913, and as now, as three strong women, in contrast to the somewhat silly self-obsessed men, epitomised by Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering—one angry and one kindly, but both doltish.

That feminism has now lost its way completely is hardly the fault of that immediate post-war generation of women, those of the 1950s who applauded long for My Fair Lady and stood by Eliza in her own stand for independence and respect; the generation who eventually saw off the legal constraints that still made women’s lives inferior. Nor did these women discredit Shaw’s taken-for-granted message about men and women as different in nature and needs; indeed, the songs of the 1950s musical enhanced this message, as Higgins rants about the impossibility of comprehending females—“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”—and Eliza muses on retributive modes of execution of the domineering male—“Just you wait, ’enry ’iggins, just you wait.”

Such a view of the tension between the sexes was not perceived as off-beam in the 1950s in the way that it would be regarded by many now, when gender identities are deemed “fluid”, although most of us secretly suspect they are not. This may well be why people flocked in the 1950s, and do so now, to these old musicals: for their calming certainties about traditional identities. And none is more reassuring than My Fair Lady.

With the important proviso that not all was certain, and in this we see a difference between the Edwardian world and the world of Lerner and Loewe. Recognised openly in neither generation of previous viewers, and generally not allowed even by present viewers, was the true meaning attached at the time to two “confirmed old bachelors” as the play actually calls them; sometimes also known as “bachelors gay”. However, it’s likely that the sophisticated urban audiences of Pygmalion had more idea of this undercurrent of homosexual possibility than the suburban audiences of the 1950s, where from Liberace to Rock Hudson, all men in public view were deemed irrepressibly and romantically heterosexual. For his own reasons, Shaw had always strongly resisted the often-sought “happy” ending of Eliza marrying Higgins. He insisted the new musical should stick to his knitting: Eliza was to marry Freddy, and Higgins to remain a sexual enigma. Thus, Lerner and Loewe felt pressured to leave the conclusion of Eliza’s marriage to Higgins open at the end.

Two other men, both of them drones, also feature in Shaw’s instructive morality play and thus in the musical. Alfred P. Doolittle, Eliza’s father, is always a crowd-pleaser, as in this performance. Everyone loves a scallywag. Alfred is Shaw’s Undeserving Everyman, the Cockney amoralist, a main-chancer with a smooth tongue that Higgins, applying phonetics, is sure comes from a Welsh inheritance, making me silently pleased to be Welsh myself, for the love of language at least, even though Eliza at one stage rails against “words, words, words” as a susbtitute for romantic action. Seeking money, and getting five pounds in exchange for Eliza, Alfred Doolittle is palmed off by Higgins but eventually inherits a fortune from a “moral reform” proponent as “the most original moralist in England”, money which paradoxically forces him into the middle classes—and marriage.

Then there is Freddy, the re-made Eliza’s new beau, quickly sidelined by Lerner and Loewe, a brainless upper-middle-class fop, hanging penniless onto the appurtenances of his class, as many did, and still do. In this matinee performance, his impassioned love song elicits audience laughter, and it is not kindly, which I fear is sad for the future of declarative romance, even from such as Freddy. Nevertheless, such cultural appurtenances as the hapless Freddie displays do matter. That was Shaw’s basic point. Take a Cockney flower girl and change her accent and her manners, add expensive dresses, widen her horizons, and you can make a proper enough young lady to catch a socially eligible young man’s heart as she speaks “the new small talk”. This is so even should she in her early first steps bring an unwanted Shakespearean directness, the intuitive flair of common speech, into the drawing room; namely in Eliza’s beautifully-toned and perfectly articulated statement, when conversationally confiding the possibility of dark doings over a female relative’s demise, “It is my belief that he done her in.”

There is a breathtaking arrogance in all of this puppetry, this linguistic and social changing, of course, and it is all Shaw’s fault. He makes Professor Higgins a “phoneticist”; Higgins hears the phonemes, pronunciations, the essential small parts of speech and of accent. He displays for the lower orders his seemingly magical skills in accurately locating the plethora of British accents found amongst Eliza’s fellow denizens as the lower and upper classes brush shoulders waiting for taxis near Covent Garden in the opening scenes. Henry Higgins’s first song, a pointedly professorial aria that presages all that is to follow, is a complaint about dialect, about accent, an insistence on the essential privileging of the “received” English of the upper classes of southern England. Shaw’s solution was to give it to everyone. Admirable in some ways, but flooded out by history.

This “solution” has affected my own life. Aged nearly eleven, having lived in Australia in public housing in Sydney’s west until then, I was sent to live with my maternal grandmother in England for eighteen months due to collapsed family circumstances. Settling down well in my new environment, I passed all tests with high marks and my headmistress in the local school in a poor area was assured my future at grammar school would be bright. However, she thought my Australian accent with its Welsh undertones, not improved by the accent of the local children at my school or by my home situation, would always hold me back, so she did an intensive Professor Higgins job on me. Regularly, after school and during it, I attuned my ear and vocal cords to a new set of vowels and phonemes. Speak like the Queen, my dear, she encouraged me. Perhaps she had seen My Fair Lady.

I reflect now that any advances in life I have made since then have been possible in a significant part due to my “improved” accent, which I have never lost; it is simply how I speak, although I hope far less crystal-toned these days. There have been times in my adult life when my accent has mattered, has been advantageous, particularly in England, but also in Australia, especially when forging my way alone, returned to familial disaster and the Sydney of my youth. It was a help to let people just assume things about my education and background when I went looking for a job at fourteen; things far from the truth of it.

Today, with mass immigration into older cultures, the world has turned again. Even among England’s middle classes accent matters less, and there is a profusion of other markers of status. Even the royals have modulated their tone to meet mass culture; as to full-blown Cockney, it is rarely heard. My Fair Lady is truly a cherished blast from the past. In Australia, too, our speech has a thousand new influences. The faux-professor Afferbeck Lauder, our very own “phoneticist” of some decades ago, would be hard put to comprehend it all now.

For what it’s worth, my conclusion about Eliza’s social mobility (and my own) is that it is all about picking up cues. Languages and cultures are not static. They are learned and changeable. Which is why, at the Artificial Intelligence Unit of MIT, the originator of an early computer program in the 1960s that responded sympathetically in counterpoint to a human speaking to it, doing this by a process of “pattern matching”, called his new program “Eliza”. After Eliza Doolittle, he explained, in My Fair Lady.