In 2 Classics By Bernard Shaw, Profiteers and Siren Songs

By Matt Wolf

What becomes a theatrical classic most? The ability of a time- honored play to tantalize anew, in the process revealing some kind of timelessness or else awakening us to a sense of distance between the specifics of the text and now. Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara,” for instance, may seem safely remote from contemporary concerns: how many of us these days come across the sorts of Salvation Army heroines that populate this play, not to mention the classic Broadway musical “Guys and Dolls”? But the current National Theatre revival confirms its presumably immortal status on the topic of putting money first, as our heroine’s father, Andrew Undershaft, so famously does. He is Mammon, a divining light for which the very concept of omnipotence might have been coined.

“Major Barbara” is arguably not as well-known as Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” which is newly opened for a summer season ending Aug. 9 at the Old Vic Theatre, whose artistic director is Kevin Spacey. After enjoying the biggest sellout so far of the Spacey regime with the bruisingly American David Mamet play “Speed the Plow,” the same venue has since been given over to a play that will forever be affiliated with its perennially performed Broadway musical equivalent, “My Fair Lady.” So it’s not the director Peter Hall’s fault if you occasionally feel the audience straining to hear a nonexistent orchestra, though it’s hard to imagine a spoken or sung Eliza Doolittle who is quite as immediately enchanting as the comparative newcomer Michelle Dockery is here – and without benefit of singing a single note.

The tall, preternaturally poised Dockery reminds you of this play’s durability with the same ease with which she redefines the role of the Cockney flower girl, Eliza, who becomes the better clothed experiment of the emotionally arrested phonetician, Henry Higgins (Tim Pigott-Smith), and his poshly spoken sidekick, Pickering (James Laurenson). The play may resonate less comprehensively at a time when young Britons purposefully want to talk streetwise, or tough, regardless of background, in an attempt to sign on to a nation’s growing working-class “chav” culture. But if the transformation wrought upon Eliza seems nowadays not so much the stuff of fairy tale as an invitation to anger and rage, that’s all to the benefit of a production that skates appealingly over the surface when it could afford to crack the ice just a bit more. As for Dockery, the distaff lead is the latest in a series of thespian debuts that have been achieved over the years by Hall, whose eye for budding talent would not mean much if this director weren’t also able to tap into a young unknown’s soul.

You feel for Dockery’s Eliza as the porcelain-skinned rat caught in the socially challenging cage that the Higgins household becomes. Her success at every turn is accompanied by the growing isolation that comes with being disconnected both from the world she has left behind and from the array of sophisticates who are Higgins’s compatriots, among whom Eliza is expected to shine. If “Major Barbara” puts a war profiteer (Undershaft) center stage, “Pygmalion” does much the same for the men keen either to use Eliza’s advancement to enhance their social ranking or, in the case of the heroine’s own father, the dustman Doolittle, to bump up however gently their bank accounts.

You’d feel pretty used, too, if you were being pushed this way and that for the advancement of those who in the final analysis don’t seem to care whether or not you end up alone – the exact state in which this Higgins, more than Eliza, is tellingly placed at the play’s end. Amid a staging that substitutes ready amiability for the incisive fervor on view in “Major Barbara,” Pigott-Smith has springy, slouchy fun in a part that in other productions has contained an aspect about it of terror. Or perhaps it’s just that all involved – Tony Haygarth’s vocally rushed Doolittle included – are struck somewhat in the presence of a genuine discovery in Dockery, whose triumph has been to resubmit a play about speech as a burgeoning performer’s siren song.

Dockery previously appeared this year for the same director, Hall, on tour in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” playing the young, impossibly beautiful Yelena, a role taken on the West End a generation ago by Greta Scacchi. And here is Scacchi back on stage at the Vaudeville Theatre being directed by a second Hall, Edward, who also happens to be Peter’s son. Her part is that of a suicidal magistrate’s wife, Hester, in Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea,” and Scacchi gives it a good crack. But the problem is that this onetime movie mainstay can’t surmount the period trappings of a 1952 play that sometimes could be said to choke on its stiff upper lip: instead of offering up what “King Lear” describes as “the weight of [a] sad time” so that we feel Hester’s pain, one is left clocking the star’s facial resemblance to various screen queens at their more melodramatic. Scacchi is so busy crying that she all but ensures that you don’t. The production continues through July 5.

What’s missing is that sense of feelings being teased out – revised, even – that renders the current Almeida Theatre production of “Rosmersholm” such a thrill, even for those who might feel as if London some time ago reached saturation point with lesser-known Ibsen. In fact, here’s a dramatic curiosity from 1886 that is eminently worth reclamation in its depiction of the horrific weight of the past brought to bear on the present. For Ibsen here, as elsewhere, what has happened once dictates what remains to come, the role of free will in “Rosmersholm” given chillingly over to a central pull directly toward the grave, though to say too much more would negate the impact of a plot rife with those character- revealing land mines Ibsen does so well.

Paul Hilton’s lanky frame can barely contain the fevered outpourings that besiege his Johannes Rosmer, who from the start talks of having lost a blessed wife, not to mention his faith. Or do his sufferings not mysteriously offer a vital opportunity to the lady of a death-plagued manse in Helen McCrory’s Rebecca West, who very quickly embarks upon a struggle for the great man’s soul? The play is febrile and witty, its characters at once anxious and as still as the characters in the Vilhelm Hammershoi canvases from which the set designer Hildegard Bechtler took her cue. Those in London can see a rare Hammershoi retrospective at the Royal Academy, running June 28 to Sept. 7. Playgoers up for “Rosmersholm” have less time: the production finishes its limited run July 5.

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

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