Review of Dear Liar – George Bernard Shaw argues with the original Eliza in Pygmalion | stage

WWhen Jerome Quilty was stationed in London with the US Army during World War II, he accompanied George Bernard Shaw. The octogenarian playwright “received us warmly,” he recalls. Quilty became an actor and playwright himself, and inspired Shaw’s greatest success – this 1957 duet derived from the author’s enthusiastic, if incomplete, correspondence with Lady Patrick Campbell, the original Eliza in Pygmalion.

Campbell’s splendor is lost to memory, while Shaw’s plays slip from the repertoire. Why bother with their antique sparring? This revival relies on the emotional performances of Rachel Pickup and Alan Turkington as two huge characters who struggle between courtship and combat.

The first chapter focuses on the efforts to organize Pygmalion. “I would be a beautiful bitch,” Campbell writes. Contractual negotiations are all pain and flirtation. Everyone is quick to provoke: “I’ll sit here and howl,” Shaw shouted. “All I ask is to have my own way in everything.” Rehearsals were bogged down by her flawed Cockney accent and over-the-top direction, but the show triumphed.

Then we see the collapse of their relationship, especially when each of them tries to exploit their relationship in a play or memoir. Meanwhile, Shaw’s curiosity takes him behind the scenes at his mother’s cremation; His pacifism makes him angry rather than comforted when Campbell loses his son in the war.

The modern theater maker might navigate this material differently: scholars now frame Campbell as a psychologically acute actress rather than a volatile diva. Stella Powell-Jones’s production isn’t always helped by the rickety script: it’s poignant when the speakers stare, unsure how to receive the message, but exhausting when you’re asking the actors to deliver their speech to each other.

Dressed in calico (with a caricature of Shaw on Turkington’s shirt), the actors move between cloud-dotted curtains designed by Tom Paris. Picking up, chandelier earrings trembling with rage, become poignantly still in old age; Turkington is easily injured, his hands raw and stuffed in his pockets.

Desire overshadows their conversations (“I absolutely refuse to play horse before your Lady Godiva any longer!”) – are they merely, as Campbell says, “lustless lions playing?” These two feisty artists engage in each other’s fantasies—although Kelty’s play can’t quite shake off the cobwebs.