Shaw was an anarchist: where is all the chaos?

CULTURE SHOCK:SO FAR AS I know, Annabelle Comyn's delightful production of Bernard Shaw's Pygmalionis the first time it has been on the Abbey stage. This is odd, and not simply because the play is Shaw's biggest commercial success, the one in which he most successfully translates his dense ideas into accessible and immediate drama.

If you think about it in an Abbey context, Pygmalionseems like a very Irish play. It bounces off various parts of the Irish repertoire in interesting ways.

It is, in its underlying narrative, a teasing variation on The Playboy of the Western World. Synge’s Christy Mahon is a wretch who finds his voice and becomes a man. Shaw’s Eliza is a wretch who loses her voice and becomes a woman.

Shaw does in Pygmalionwhat O'Casey does later in The Plough and the Stars, providing a satiric self-portrait. The arrogant phonetician Henry Higgins (vividly realised by Risteard Cooper) is Shaw himself without all his redeeming features – a cranky, superior, verbose, rationalist know-all – just as O'Casey's Young Covey is what O'Casey himself would be if he could not write.

Pygmalionis, in one of its strands, a self-conscious contemplation of the relationship between the artist and his fictions (Higgins essentially invents Eliza as a fictional character), prefiguring Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds. And, of course, Shaw's play about language and power is a natural companion to the play that is to follow it on the Abbey stage, Brian Friel's Translations. (If ever there was a case for the old system of running plays in repertory, this is it.) The first job of an Abbey production of the play is, therefore, simply to slide it into the Irish repertoire with confidence, breaking the taboo that Shaw belongs to the Gate in the way that Synge belongs to the Abbey.

Comyn’s beautifully cast, elegantly designed and slickly paced production does this well. The clarity and precision of the performances – from Cooper, Eleanor Methven as his mother, Charlie Murphy as Eliza and Lorcan Cranitch as Doolittle – indicate a buoyant self-assurance.

The next task is to judge just how modern a play Pygmalionreally is. It is tempting to take Pygmalionout of its original Edwardian setting altogether – tempting but impossible. In many respects Pygmalionhas become more modern as time has gone on, but in one respect it has become less so.

On the one hand the themes of language and social codes, of the construction of personality and of social engineering, have a decidedly contemporary ring. On the other Henry Higgins could never be our contemporary. Once you live in a society that acknowledges homosexuality Higgins cannot but be an anachronistic figure.

A “confirmed bachelor”? Check. Higgins calls himself a “confirmed old bachelor and likely to remain so”.

Thinks the world of his mother and has never met a woman who can match her? Check.

Meets a fellow in the street and invites him to move in with him? Check. Higgins “picks up” Pickering in the opening scene and next we know they’re cohabiting.

Happens to have a collection of pretty Japanese kimonos lying about at home? Check.

Finds a woman acceptable when he can imagine her as a man? Check. Higgins tells Eliza near the end: “You and I and Pickering will be three old bachelors together instead of only two men and a silly girl.”

Anyone writing Higgins in the past 40 years would have had to make him a repressed gay man who really needs to get out of the closet. It is only within the frame of Edwardian culture that Higgins is credible.

There is surely a certain anxiety about Higgins’s sexuality that adds to the desire for a romantic ending in which he marries Eliza. The thought of Higgins and Eliza ending up in bed together would banish the notion that Higgins might be happier marrying Pickering. After all, you don’t have to be a trained psychologist to find something just a little suggestive about Rex Harrison as Higgins in the musical version, My Fair Lady, singing Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man? Giving him, against Shaw’s wishes, a happy ending with Eliza banishes the obvious thought that this question might not be immediately indicative of practising heterosexuality.

Comyn’s production gets this balance right, keeping Higgins in his Edwardian world but letting the play breathe enough modern air to be immediate.

The last task is the one in which this production falls short of the ultimate ideal. It is precise, snappy, clear and witty. But the ultimate Pygmalionwould be something else as well: dizzying. It would induce a sense of vertigo. Shaw throws everything up in the air: class, gender, science, art, morality. And even the idea of comedy itself.

The tradition of comic theatre pits sensible, materially focused parents against ardent, irrational lovers. Comedy is on the side of the lovers: their youthful ardour will triumph over the narrow materialism of the old.

But Shaw turns this upside-down. Pygmalionis a Marxist comedy: economics triumph over romance. Eliza certainly fancies Higgins and perhaps even loves him: that's why she's so upset that he treats her as a thing. But she's not going to marry him. She will have much more material power when she marries the drippy Freddy. She makes the sensible decision, not the romantic one.

This is why the ending of the play is so uncomfortable. The form is comic and it creates the usual comic expectations. But the content is essentially tragic: Eliza is trapped by her fate as surely as Agamemnon ever was. The audience’s brains may be engaged by Shaw’s intellectual acuity, but their hearts yearn for the expected comic resolution.

Thus, while he was alive, Shaw had to fight against productions of the play that shaped the ending to suggest that maybe Eliza will marry Higgins after all. He went so far as to write a long epilogue to the printed text explaining why Eliza will marry Freddy, open a flower shop and live happily ever after. But when Shaw was dead, the desire for the “proper” ending triumphed. In Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady the ending is almost entirely unambiguous: Eliza returns to Higgins.

There should be something vertiginous in this willingness to throw not just ideas and values but the very form of a play into chaos. This fine production is just a little too well-mannered to achieve this. It gives us Shaw as a brilliant rationalist, but not as he also was: an incendiary anarchist.