Pygmalion - Peter Evans and Andrea Demetriades interview

First published on 15 Dec 2011. Updated on 7 Feb 2012.

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the story of a Cockney flower girl’s transformation into a well spoken society lady, has seen many incarnations, most memorably as the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical My Fair Lady. But director Peter Evans, with a reputation for staging stripped-back productions for Bell Shakespeare Company, is setting out to restore the brutality, eroticism and provocation of Shaw’s original for the Sydney Theatre stage.

 

Darryn King spoke to Evans and his Eliza, Andrea Demetriades, before the first week of rehearsals.

 

Peter Evans: Well I think a popular aspect is the Cinderella story. There’s a side of it that is a rags-to-riches story. But there’s also a Frankenstein element, whereby somebody thinks they’ve created something that then gets its own strength and comes back and spanks them.

It’s the combination of those two things that is really interesting. Each of the adaptations takes aspects of that. I suppose Educating Rita is probably the closest, where you get a similar shape to the original text. But I think there’s two sides to it: you get to watch somebody get taken into a new and glamorous world that they’ve never been a part of and become accepted, but what’s actually interesting about the play is, what does that mean to that person? And what is their relationship with their ‘inventor’?

 

 

Peter: No, we won’t be anywhere near that. Well, you know [ludicrous Cockney accent:] you’ve got to love My Fair Lady, and Audrey Hepburn don’t you? I think it’s fine, it’s just not my interest – I’m not particularly a musicals person – and it’s got nothing to do with what we’re doing here.

 

 

Andrea Demetriades: Yeah I think so. I hadn’t seen My Fair Lady before this actually.

 

Andrea: Audrey is extraordinary in it, but I guess what I’m mostly interested in is the idea of this girl going on what is almost an odyssey. We all do things to get a better partner, a better family, a better life. We change ourselves. I love how Eliza’s so good at it: she goes to the embassy where she’s extraordinary at it and people don’t even know where she’s come from. She’s so clever that she forms this new identity. She doesn’t change from the inside but all these outside aspects are changed. Shaw is just extraordinary the way he writes these deeply flawed human characters. I think that’s exciting. We don’t really get to do a lot of Shaw’s work here.

 

 

Peter: When Cate [Blanchett] and Andrew [Upton] first called me about it, my first instinct was that it was a bit stuffy…

 

 

Peter: I think so, but a couple of very dear actress friends said to me, I think you need to take this seriously and have a good look at it. And then I did, and I thought, this is pretty interesting. And the writing is spectacular.

And then I went back to Cate and Andrew and I asked them, “Why are you offering me this, what are you after?” And they said, “We just want you to blow the dust off it and see if we can hear it anew.” And that’s what I needed to hear. Because to sit in a drawing room in 1911 was not something I was interested in doing, and I think perhaps people think of Shaw as a museum piece. That said, the way that [designer] Stephen Curtis and [director] Michael Gow have just done it Brisbane, setting it in the 1950s – the reports are that people were really taken by the play.

We’ve certainly blown the dust off it a bit and people will hear it anew. But it’s a much more brutal play than the musical in a way. That’s the big difference: in the musical it was a very bittersweet, ambiguous ending, whereas both the movies played to the romance of it. But it’s actually quite a savage play, I think, and that’s what shocked me the most. It was much nastier then I remember.

 

 

Peter: We did – but it didn’t work. Because of the phonetics and the way the accents work inside it, it didn’t completely take off. But what was interesting was what you heard inside it. We heard a sort of brutality, vitality and energy coming off the page. But the play needs to be read with the accent.

 

 

Peter: We’re still kind of mucking around with that a little bit. I’m fluctuating. The swearing in it is interesting – ours is even more modern then Michael setting it in the 50s – so I think it’s really begging for that. Some of the language just needs to be altered. “Not bloody likely” was massive [the inclusion of the line caused a scandal at the London premiere in 1914] – so I think we’ve probably got to meet that. Toby [Schmitz, dramaturg for the production] and I are tinkering it at the moment, working out how much we want to bend and stretch it. Because the production is so stripped back, it’s incredibly bare, and extremely modern, there’s something about hearing some resonance of that Edwardian world that creates an interesting tension for me. Toby and I are working incrementally rather then just getting right in amongst it because I don’t want to just pick it up an plonk it – I think the tension between this kind of adaptation and having some Edwardian aspect in it is interesting.

 

 

Andrea: I think I have to base it on my truth. I remember watching the My Fair Lady version of her, sitting in between those pillars and being so out of place but also in place with the middle class. They need her – her services, and her flowers. So she belongs and she aspires to something bigger. I, myself, always feel that I can aspire to something better.

 

 

Andrea: It reminds me of this great quote I just read: men haven’t ever stopped playing with dolls. They want to be the person who gives you your second awakening. So from this perspective I definitely think there’s a deeply sexual thing that is happening between them.

 

Peter: It’s about his denial isn’t it? Because obviously the pedagogy is sexy and that’s what we read. But also that carrot-and-stick thing is sexy – the way he treats her. It’s not dissimilar to Taming of the Shrew in some aspects. But, as Toby said to me, you stick a guy and a girl in a deep relationship on stage and they’re kind of bound for something.

But I think that production that stripped it out is kind of misanthropic, I think that’s a mean thing to do. And I think that’s why Shaw’s been a bit shrill in his wanting to stay away from that. They don’t have to end up together. But there’s a frisson that has to be there for all sorts of reasons: we question what our relationships are and what we’re attracted to and what that gender and class inequality are.

 

Andrea: And they talk about marriage at the end, and him being the eternal bachelor – why would they bring any of that up…?

 

Peter: Would she be as heartbroken if there wasn’t an attraction? She wants to be seen and he keeps pretending not to see her, and that’s where the pain in those last two acts comes from. She just needs some acknowledgment that she is her own person and that she exists outside his creation. You combine that with sex – I think that’s true of a lot of relationships.

 

*** MODERATE-LEVEL SPOILER IN NEXT PARAGRAPHS ***

 

 

Peter: You leave it ambiguous. You leave it as Shaw intended it. Well, Shaw actually intended it to be clear [that Eliza and Higgins don’t wind up together] – but as it’s written you’re just left unsure. No matter how much Shaw wants us to know, I think it’s ambiguous. There are a couple of different endings that are slightly different. Our ending is more ambiguous in a way. But I think that’s the most interesting thing, we’re left going, ‘Do we want them to be together?’ We should question that part I think. We should be unsure how we feel about this relationship. I think people will be able to hear the savagery, the brutality and the confronting nature of the sexual politics in the play so the romance will be a bit tougher. I think it’s probably closer to [Who’s Afraid of] Virginia Woolf? than My Fair Lady.

 

Like Beno’s [production of Virginia Woolf]? Nah. But it is a pretty empty space.

 

 

Peter: Bob and I did Fat Pig together at the Sydney Theatre Company four, five years ago. I asked him [to design] because intellectually he’s really sharp. I knew what the questions were for this production – I didn’t have the answers but I knew we would be able to tease it out. I knew I wanted very few elements. The projects I’ve done the last few years have stripped a lot of stuff out. I knew that with only a few elements, he’s the kind of designer that would know what they are. He’s a very bold designer. And Mel’s great.

 

 

[Andrea laughs.]

 

Peter: No there’s still a big, beautiful frock.

 

Peter: I don’t think we’ll see her necessarily being happy in the frock. Sad girl in a nice frock.

 

Peter: She’ll enjoy it before she goes on stage.

 

 

Peter: What do you reckon works there?

 

 

Peter: I was really interested looking at Big and Small [Gross und Klein] though – if you kept yourself within the first five metres of that stage, it’s quite intimate. Particularly that opening with Cate. And we’ll be using the whole space, so a lot of the audience will be quite close. I’m quite buoyed by that. It doesn’t have to be War of the Roses. This is a dialogue-driven play, a big dialogue play. And it’s about language and hearing and we’re going to be exploring that a lot.

When I see big spaces quite empty I really love it. I love how beautiful it is. The image I’m joking about is Andy being a sad girl in a beautiful dress, but potentially the lone figure of a young – ish – woman on that massive stage.

 

[Andrea gasps in mock offence.]

 

 

Peter: That’s right. Psychologically it’s really interesting. That was a very early image that we had, of her alone in that dress – we understand that she doesn’t know who she is anymore.

 

 

Andrea: I guess there would be a danger. I just played Juliet, and that bit came up – “Romeo, Romeo…” – and I thought, I’ve got to do it from way back, as if I’m hearing it for the first time. Nobody wants to see an actor on stage, reciting. And the actor doesn’t want to be that person – they want to come from so much truth. And you do these famous soliloquies – I remember doing Viola in Twelfth Night – I was terrified, I thought, how am I going to do this right and the director [Lee Lewis] said “don’t do it ‘right’, just do it like you.” Then everything made sense.

 

 

Andrea: Well the voice coach is helping with the dialect, Cockney now is quite different to what it was in 1911 – that version of Cockney doesn’t exist anymore.

 

Peter: We’ll have to mould it a bit, and that will help your connection with it. I think there will be a tension between what is obviously an Australian company doing this play, which is an English play. The reason I didn’t want all the froufrou is that we aren’t doing this in London. And in a way casting Andy is like that, it’s a peculiarly Australian casting choice and I like the tension it’s going to have of us doing an English play like that.

 

Andrea: I think people from different minority groups in Australia are constantly feeling this thing. That I have to learn this – I know my father did – to learn English, to get a good job.

 

Peter: It’s got resonance for people who have gone through that kind of experience.

 

Andrea: You know the idea of taking an animal and trying to teach it some tricks to make it more human – I think that’s what’s really exciting about this.

 

Peter: I hope that people will see, even with the accent, it will still have a peculiarly Australian footprint on it. The migrant experience is really interesting, so if we can get resonance with that, that will be great.

 

Peter: Yeah yeah, there will be. I’m under no illusions. I imagine in our cast there’ll be Shaw purists.

But that’s okay. A lot of them will come around to it and will be really excited to see it afresh – and there will be some audiences who didn’t think they would be interested who I’m sure will become more interested. No point in doing it the way we’ve always done it.

 

Andrea: Exactly. We won’t do it like the English. Because the English will do it better.

 

Peter: We need to do it our way.