Smitten by My Fair Lady

I am seduced and smitten by My Fair Lady all over again. For three hours I quite forgot the horrors of war in Iraq and surrendered to the escapist pleasures of this fabulous, old-fashioned Lerner and Loewe musical which in Trevor Nunn's recast production still works its rare, quaint magic.

Anthony Andrews as Henry Higgins, the phonetics professor, who shows scant interest in sex, and Laura Michelle Kelly as Eliza the cockney flower-girl with whose accent and emotions he nonchalantly tampers with are the third pair of actors to take these daunting roles since Sir Trevor's production premiered at the National in 2001.

Both bring something fresh and provocative to a production which fascinatingly concludes with the hint that Higgins and Eliza will not be lovers but become more like a devoted father and daughter. They finally stand at a distance from each other, hands folded, laughing and at ease.

Miss Kelly is quite the most poignant, affecting Eliza I have ever seen. Even Audrey Hepburn in the exquisite film version was not quite so striking in her desolation and vulnerability. Never before has Shaw's flower-girl seemed such a pathetic victim of male abusiveness and exploitation, at the hands of her abusive, indifferent dustman father (hearty, vigorous Russ Abbot) and then as a victim of Professor Higgins's experiment in social engineering. There is an undercurrent of hysteria about her. She shrinks from the slightest threat of male violence as if used to such abuse.

It's true her Eliza lacks a cockney accent and when she emerges to dazzle at Ascot with the new-found vowelsounds that Higgins has driven into her, the voice and the joke sound rather forced. And Miss Kelly is always better being sad than joyous. "Just you wait, Henry Higgins," she cries with fierce vehemence. Her voice is always powerful and sweet and she sings I Could Have Danced All Night with beautiful, effortless reaching of the high notes. But there is no great sense of ecstasy.

Yet once Eliza has triumphed at the Embassy ballroom and Andrews's impressively smug, chilly Higgins has claimed the success as his own, Miss Kelly's performance acquires a fearful quality of desperation and panic. She realises her passion for the Professor is not requited. "What is to become of me," she keeps asking, with the panic of someone cut from their roots, transplanted in the shallowest uppercrust soil.

Anthony Andrews's Higgins, all sleek, self-interested and semidetached from the real world, as he chats about vowels with Stephen Moore's nicely languid Colonel, adopts a voice which keeps rising to high-notes of irritation and petulance, in a style perfected by Rex Harrison. And he delivers the songs with emphatic vehemence. The performance forcefully suggests what damage emotionally stunted men cause when involved in the sex war.

The production, which flows more smoothly and swiftly than at the National, wears well. Michael Xavier's drawling, silly-ass Freddy is a particularly vivid comic delight. Anthony Ward's sets look a little dowdy, but Matthew Bourne's choreography keeps its gusto.

Only David Hersey's lighting design, which swathes the stage in a murky half light that obscures the actors' faces, needs immediate attention. My Fair Lady remains, however, some enchanted evening.

My Fair Lady