my fair lady in Brisbane

My Fair Lady is a play adapted from George Bernard Shaw's book called Pygmalion. It was by pure chance that I learned that this was being shown in Brisbane: I was on my way back to Highgate Hill from Indooroopilly when I saw the billboard on a bus (the wonders of advertising!). Since I've often heard my parents mention this play to me and my brother and sister (along with Carousel, the King and I, and Annie), I decided to spend my last night in Brisbane watching the play.

This production, being staged at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC) in Brisbane's South Bank, is produced by Opera Australia; the production is touring different Australian cities. The cast was led by two well-known Australian stage performers: Taryn Feibig as Eliza Doolittle and Reg Livermore as Professor Henry Higgins. The book and the lyrics were by Alan Jay Lerner, while music is credited to Frederick Loewe.

Basically, the story is about how Prof Higgins transforms Eliza, a flower girl who belongs to London's working class into someone anyone can mistake as coming from the privileged class. After six months, Higgins credits himself for Eliza's success and she realises that she can be independent and no longer needs him.

The play explored the boundaries drawn between different social classes, as emphasised by differences in the way the English language was spoken: the London working class spoke Cockney which has its unique ways of pronunciation, and the English language as spoken by the educated and upper class. There was reluctance to move up the social ladder, as exemplified by Eliza's father, who loved the perks of having a lot of money but did not like the expected behaviour coming with the move up (he's marrying Eliza's stepmother because he's become respectable). The clothes were also used as means to show how different social classes were. When the play began, Eliza was wearing layered clothing and small hats... as the play ends, she was wearing gowns, shiny dresses, and huge hats (that were full of feathers and almost buried her head).

Feminists would have a problem with this play, especially with the way Prof Higgins treated Eliza and the other women in his life. He clearly thought that women are lower life forms, and men are better than women. Extending this view, to him, perhaps, women are nothing more than creatures that go around picking up after him. Clearly, he's a self-absorbed chauvinist. On another extreme, however, Prof Higgins can be seen as a homosexual, and the ultimate feminist, finding fault in women that he wants to change to make them perfect. He is a self-proclaimed bachelor, apparently because he despises women. Yet he may not be disgusted with them, but envies them instead. He asks Colonel Pickering why can't a woman be more like a man, and more pointedly, like Pickering. In the end, though he is sorrowful that Eliza has left him, his attitude towards her has not changed ("where are my slippers?").

No wonder the play is a classic, with different revivals, tours, and movie versions. Clearly, though the play was set in the early 1900s, the theme of equality, not only among social classes but also between the genders, is not missed by the audience and can still spark discussion almost a century later.