Crosspatch

Rupert Everett doesn’t care for critics.

Rupert Everett doesn’t care for critics. ‘You see them coming into the theatre,’ he says, ‘like the homeless who’ve lost their soup-kitchen, shuffling in with their plastic bags, deranged and vacant.’ After watching him play Henry Higgins in Pygmalion the reviewers have dumped poor Rupe in the poop. ‘Sad to witness,’ said one. ‘Lacking in intellectual joie de vivre,’ lamented another. ‘Respectable,’ said a third. (I bet that hurt.) And Everett, a leading practitioner of bitchcraft, lashed out and accused his attackers of not being able to afford their own sandwiches.

He’s right to cavil at the cavillers because I can’t remember a more entertaining version of the role. Everett is an odd blend of Higgins and non-Higgins. He’s naturally disdainful and rather cross with the world, and faintly misogynistic, too, so all that comes easily enough. But he erases Higgins’s dusty academic hauteur and replaces it with elegance, a dark magnetism, and an erudite self-mocking warmth. Anyone who has read Everett’s classic Hollywood memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, knows that he’s as astute and witty as anyone who ever went west. So the sense of intellectual grip, and joie de vivre come to that, are precisely what he brings to the show. He even makes sense of Higgins’s strangely needy yet perfectly sexless adoration of Eliza. A wonderful comic performance.

There’s excellent support from Peter Eyre (Colonel Pickering), whose voice is one of the loveliest things in the English-speaking world. It’s like an orchestra of oboes wafting across a starlit lake. Higgins’s knowing and exasperated mother is played by Diana Rigg with suitably twinkly grandeur. Kara Tointon, a name unfamiliar to those unfamiliar with primetime telly, starts off very loud and boorish as Eliza but improves rapidly and turns the ‘not bloody likely’ moment into a personal triumph.