New Eliza makes us miss Martine

The West End welcomed its new Eliza Doolittle to Drury Lane with cheers, bravos and a partial standing ovation. In a fairer world, indeed, Joanna Riding's debut in My Fair Lady would have obliterated all memories of her predecessor, Martine McCutcheon.

A slight woman, surely shorter than the 5ft 6in of Colonel Pickering's description of Eliza to the police, Riding's Eliza started the evening looking as insignificant as the squashed cabbage leaf to which her mentor, Higgins, compares her.

As soon as she opened her mouth, however, and one of her terrifyingly elongated vowels escaped, you knew this was exactly the girl from Lisson Grove to shatter the silence of the professor's rooms in Wimpole Street.

Riding gave welly to the scenes where Eliza lost her temper with the creepy bachelor whose Blunkett-like obsession is to teach the entire population to speak proper. Her singing, slightly murky to begin with, scrubbed up well for the big numbers, and took flight with The Rain in Spain) as, indeed, did she, dancing all over the prof 's furniture.

Her delivery of Alan Lerner's improvement on Shaw's line "not bloody likely" ) "Come on Dover, move your blooming arse" - got the huge laugh it was always designed to.

In front of me, a lady announced she'd seen the original production at the Dury Lane in 1956 and, although they had all thought Julie Andrews wonderful, "this production is even better".

The odious comparisons I made, however, dated back only a few months to the McCutcheon era. McCutcheon, aka Tiffany Mitchell of EastEnders, is no better actress and, probably less than of a singer than Riding, whose form includes Guys and Dolls and The Witches of Eastwick. But McCutcheon brought things to the part Riding can't hope to.

Among these was a new audience. In place of last night's rows of middle aged, middle class women were teenage fans of McCutcheon's TV and pop career. Without being a Professor Higgins, you could hear in their voices that many had made a rare and eye-opening trip to the National Theatre from the East End.

With McCutcheon's telly credentials, came additionally the real-life tension over whether she could carry off Eliza's transformation to la-di-da in the second act. People's verdicts differed on the voice coach's success, but a debate raged. With Riding, although she is actually Lancastrian, we were back to the bad old days of Andrews and Audrey Hepburn: posh totty impersonates cockney.

But Riding's real problem is that, unlike her co-stars Jonathan Pryce and Dennis Waterman, she is primarily a creature of the theatre. At 34, her looks, frankly, get better the cheaper the seat you are in.