Well. There is already news on the Pygmalion<\/I> front. My director was unable to find a fellow to play the Mad Hrungarian, so she has asked me to double. This character does not appear in early versions of the play, but Mr. Shaw wrote him in so that the Ball and the actual imposture could be shown onstage. The character is a phoneticist, an early pupil of Henry Higgins, in fact, who in addition to teaching people to better their station by speaking proper English (like a lady in a flower shop) makes a very nice living blackmailing people who want to hide the pasts they reveal, unknowingly, through their accents.
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He is called Nepommuck (in My Fair Lady<\/I>, he is called Zoltan Koparte), and he is described as having marvelous moustache and whiskers. I shall insist on them. Which, alas, means shaving my own upper lip to play Alfie (I call him Alfie ’cos I know him so well, you see), but I shall make that sacrifice.
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The plan, then, will be to begin the play in dirt and tatters, hie off to the dressing room (there is a proper dressing room at the playhouse, which will be a mercy) to wash off the theater dirt and apply the moustachios; I have all of the at-home scene and an intermission for that. Then, once I have proclaimed Eliza a princess, I go into the wings and peel off the mustachios, put on a swallow-tail coat (I’m hoping) and come in again as Rich Alfie. It’ll be tight, but I think it can be done. Unfortunately, I have no idea what a Hungarian accent sounds like. Ah, well. I suspect a MittelEuropean funny accent will do for half-a-dozen lines.
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I hope to write later about the inclusion of the Ball scene; I was initially against it, but it does underline the point that Shaw makes in a variety of different ways: Society imposes a set of bizarre, arbitrary and stupid rules, and people enforce them sporadically and incompetently without understanding them at all. Alfred Doolittle the garbage collector is not welcome, but Alfred Doolittle the heir is welcome. Prof. Nepommuck is able to get rich off the secret accents of European society, because nobody else is able to even hear the differences that, were they to be exposed, would ruin the watchmaker’s son. Silly people don’t know their own silly business, as Higgins says.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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