Nathaniel Parker headlines Opera Australia’s latest musical
How My Fair Lady Changed My Life
I went to My Fair Lady expecting a musical. I came home requiring elocution lessons, and ideas about revenge on a woman in a chocolate shop.
This is what happens when the theatre is allowed to interfere with your life. A few days earlier I had gone into my local chocolate shop, where the woman behind the counter treated me with the sort of chilly contempt normally reserved for people attempting to pay for a Lamborghini with loose change. I had done nothing obviously offensive. I wanted chocolate and I could pay for it. In most societies this is considered a fairly straightforward commercial transaction.
Nevertheless, I left with the distinct impression that I had failed an examination I had not realised I was sitting.
Then I saw My Fair Lady.
A revelation watching Eliza Doolitte
Halfway through watching Eliza Doolittle being converted from Covent Garden flower seller into a woman who can be mistaken for foreign royalty just by learning to pronounce her vowels and wearing a fabulous dress, I experienced a revelation.
It was my voice. I have always known that my voice is slightly nasal, but I had never regarded this as a social impediment. Nobody has previously run screaming from the room. But maybe the chocolate woman could hear something I couldn’t.
Maybe somewhere in my vowels lurked the unmistakable sound of a person who buys the chocolates on special. Professor Henry Higgins would know. So I have begun work.
I have bought candles and I am now wandering around the house declaring that the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain and telling rose and lychee centred lighted soy that hurricanes hardly happen in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire.
They certainly happen in my house. My family has begun closing doors. I should emphasise that I have never been particularly careless with my aitches. I neither drop them nor scatter additional ones about the language like confetti. I say aitch, rather than haitch, and have thus always believed myself safe from Professor Higgins.
Apparently not. Clothing, too, is being addressed. Eliza does not achieve social mobility in an old cardigan. This has been noted. I have purchased some new threads and, once my vowels have been sufficiently fumigated, intend to return to the chocolate shop.
If the woman greets me warmly and immediately produces the expensive truffles, I shall have proved George Bernard Shaw correct and overturned several decades of social science. If she remains rude, I shall buy nothing. This will show her.
The 70th anniversary production of My Fair Lady
None of this, I gather was what Opera Australia intended. Its 70th anniversary production of My Fair Lady is not advertised as a self-help seminar. Yet there is something extraordinarily contemporary about a musical built around the proposition that changing the way a woman speaks and dresses can completely change the way society treats her.
Nathaniel Parker as Prof Henry Higgins
Nathaniel Parker takes on Professor Henry Higgins, the phonetics expert who hears Eliza speak and reacts roughly as a building inspector might react to discovering termites. Parker is excellent. Australian audiences will know him from The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, although his stage credentials include an Olivier Award for playing Henry VIII in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Higgins requires a particular sort of actor because he must spend much of the evening being catastrophically insensitive while somehow preventing the audience from marching onto the stage and hitting him with a parasol. Parker pulls it off.
Claire Lyon as Eliza Doolittle
Claire Lyon, meanwhile, has the much greater task of playing Eliza, who must transform without ever looking as though she has simply been reupholstered by a man. And she is wonderful.
Higgins believes he is teaching Eliza how to speak. Eliza gradually discovers that she is learning how to be heard. That distinction is the whole musical.
Reg Livermore is back
And then there is Reg Livermore. Good heavens. Livermore returns as Alfred P. Doolittle and bounds onto the stage with enough energy to make you question several things about your own lifestyle. There are people forty years younger who require assistance getting out of a beanbag.
The Australian accent gives Doolittle a splendid quality. Cockney and Australian speech are, after all, distant relatives who occasionally meet at weddings and steal each other’s cigarettes.
Robin Nevin, Tony Llewellyn-Jones and a stellar cast
Robyn Nevin returns as Mrs Higgins, Tony Llewellyn-Jones as Colonel Pickering, Anne Wood plays Mrs Pearce and David Whitney reprises Karpathy. It’s a formidable cast, surrounded by an ensemble large enough to remind you what musical theatre looked like before somebody discovered that projections were cheaper than people.
And the songs. I had forgotten how many good songs are crammed into My Fair Lady.
“Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”
“I Could Have Danced All Night.”
“Get Me to the Church on Time.”
Then comes Ascot. The black-and-white race scene has costumes faithful to the famous look of the film and wonderful choreography. Yet it bears little resemblance to any race meeting I have ever attended. But beneath the hats and the songs is the reason My Fair Lady still works. Speech is social currency.
We make assumptions about people within seconds of hearing them. Accent suggests class. Vocabulary suggests education. Clothes suggest money. Confidence suggests that somebody has never had to ring a utility company and beg for an extension.
Eliza changes her vowels and suddenly society changes its opinion of her. Which brings me back to the chocolate shop.
My preparations continue. Soon I shall return, freshly dressed and nasality subdued with vowels polished until they gleam. I shall enter calmly and I shall request chocolates in tones normally associated with minor European royalty. If the service improves, I shall know the experiment has worked. If it doesn’t, I will return the following week dressed as Audrey Hepburn at Ascot. Then if I still cannot get a civil box of chocolates, the problem is clearly no longer my vowels.
Tickets at Opera Australia until October 31, 2026.
