Lee McQueen has problems speaking properly. He finds final consonants difficult. His catchphrase comes out as something like: ‘Thass wa’ I’m tauwkih abow’. In case you’ve already forgotten who he is: Lee McQueen overcame his poor presentation skills to win this year’s final of The Apprentice. Lee has won a job. All those trials and tribulations and pterodactyls for 12 gruelling weeks and all he gets at the end of it is a job. A wonderfully well paid new job but still: just a job.
The glottal stop has had its day. Ken and Tony are gone and Boris and David are on the rise: upper class accents are en vogue and the Sloane rangers swarm and multiply once more! John Major’s vision of a classless society has receded even further into history than the man himself. Social mobility is on the decline. Identity and income are increasingly matters more of birth and schooling than individual achievement. The appeal of The Apprentice lies partly in a contemporary craving for a society run on principles of meritocracy: Lee McQueen may not have a posh accent but he was still deemed the best man for the job. If all it took was sculpted vowels then Raef Bjayou would have won.
It is a new job that flower girl Eliza Doolittle is after when she presents herself at the house of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion at the Old Vic in London. She wants to sell flowers in a shop rather than from the gutter and feels that the right accent and diction will unlock the door to her dream. Professor Henry Higgins agrees to her request for selfish reasons of his own: to win a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can pass her off as a Duchess at the Ambassador’s garden party.
Pygmalion is as difficult to stage nowadays: the shadow of My Fair Lady looms long over George Bernard Shaw’s play and it is all too easy for Eliza to sound like graduates of the Dick Van Dyke academy of accents. The cockney vowels and vocabulary captured by Shaw in 1913 are as dated as the five act format. Michelle Dockery successfully navigates both of Eliza’s voices without a trace of pastiche and it is impossible not to care what becomes of her.
Sir Peter Hall’s production successfully draws out the unpleasant and, at times, frankly disturbing class prejudices in the play which form the backdrop for the rise of eugenics a little later in the 20th century. Tim Piggott Smith’s voice drips with casual contempt as his Henry Higgins describes Eliza (in her presence) as ‘baggage’, ‘creature’, ‘insect’ and ‘draggletailed guttersnipe’ whose fate is a matter of supreme indifference once he’s won his bet.
James Laurenson’s bluff but kind Colonel Pickering is a perfect foil for Piggot Smith whose gangling grace makes a gloriously petulant Daddy Long Legs of Professor Higgins. Tony Haygarth does his best to rescue Alfred Doolittle’s tiresome monologues on middle-class morality and Una Stubbs is a pleasure to watch as Mrs Pearce, Higgins’ long-suffering housekeeper.
Several early productions of Pygmalion changed the ending – to Shaw’s fury – to have Eliza marry Henry Higgins. Peter Hall goes the other way. Eliza’s eventual marriage to chinless wonder Freddy Eynsford Hill (Matt Barber) is far from a ‘happy’ ending in this production. The inference is clear: Eliza cannot contemplate life in a flower shop after her training – she has seen and learnt too much to be truly happy anywhere and marries for want of a better option. Let’s hope Lee McQueen can cope now the cameras have left him to get on with the rest of his life. And his all-important job of course.
