Yet Trevor Nunn’s marvelous new staging, which opened in London last month, makes the play seem fresh. Earlier Elizas like Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn had to disguise their cut-glass accents during the first few scenes, putting on faux cockney during Eliza’s “squashed cabbage” phase. But Nunn cast Martine McCutcheon, a British soap-opera and pop star–and a genuine working-class actress–as his Eliza. Orchestrator William David Brohn has trimmed the swooping strings from Frederick Loewe’s score; the result is a bolder, funkier sound, even for numbers like Henry Higgins’s misogynist rant, “I’m an Ordinary Man.” Choreographer Matthew Bourne makes the toffs paw and whinny like horses at Ascot, and rescues the Cockney partying number–“With a Little Bit of Luck”–from cheeky cuteness by rendering it as a raucous garbage-can tap dance.
In some ways Britain hasn’t changed much since the era depicted by Shaw. In economic terms, the Victorian story of Britain as not one but two nations–one rich, one poor–rings truer than ever. The gap between the incomes of the richest and the poorest has again begun to widen in the last five years. A 1999 study by the London School of Economics found that child poverty has increased dramatically since the 1960s: as many as one in three children lives in poverty, compared with one in 10 in 1968.
But in so many other ways Britain has been transformed. Status consciousness has replaced class rivalry as society’s driving force. Titles no longer dazzle: stale chronicles of blue bloods are strictly for the blue-rinse set. The tabloid industry thrives on tales of aristocrats in rehab and royals on topless beaches. For the young, people like singer Posh Spice and her husband, footballer David Beckham, are the new royalty, envied not for their breeding but for their money and celebrity. The Duchess of York was reduced to doing Weight Watchers ads to keep her in the style to which she’s grown accustomed.
What changed Britain? Compulsory education, immigration and a competitive job market have helped break down class divides. In 1926 the BBC set up a committee to standardize an “educated” English for broadcasters; today the deregulation of the airwaves has brought a host of accents–and languages–to British ears. The demise of heavy industry in favor of a service industry means that working behind a desk instead of at the coalface doesn’t necessarily make you middle class. But while the old codes are fraying, the obsession with one’s standing sticks: when the BBC added a “Check your class” link to its Web site last month, thousands of people jammed onto the site to do just that.
Thanks in large part to the media, a new sort of meritocracy has replaced the aristocracy. For the better part of the last year, the country has been gripped by “Big Brother,” the TV show in which ordinary Britons are transformed into celebrities by living together on camera and periodically voting to evict one of their housemates. Last month the corollary show aired: on “Celebrity Big Brother,” a range of B-list TV personalities are confined to a house and humiliatingly evicted just like ordinary folks. In the whirl of the modern British status system, Eliza wouldn’t have had to bother with all those elocution lessons; she’d simply have auditioned for reality TV.
“My Fair Lady” is fundamentally a play about transformation and, as such, is perfectly in tune with the mores of Tony Blair’s Britain. George Bernard Shaw’s faith in the makeover and the fresh start sound spookily similar to Blair’s vision of society. Blair may be a Third Way politician, and Shaw may have been a socialist, but they share a belief that the hardworking individual can triumph over hidebound social systems. At the end of both Shaw’s play and the musical, there is a sense that Henry Higgins has created a misfit: a woman who can’t go back to her working-class roots, but is too independent to don the society-lady straitjacket. Pity she wasn’t born in Blair’s Britain: she would have fit right in.
