Review: Meine faire Dame: Ein Sprachlabor, Lowland Hall, Edinburgh International Festival

Written for Culture Wars

When you actually think about it, Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 musical is pretty, well, fucked up. Based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, it shows middle-class speech-therapist Henry Higgins pluck cockney flower-seller Eliza Doolittle off the streets and painstakingly rewire her to pass for a high-society belle. FOR A BET. That won, Higgins decides that he’s fallen in love with her and, though there’s some ambiguity in the ending, she only goes and reciprocates. So that’s alright then.

All of which explains why you’ll find Frankenstein’s monster playing the organ in Christoph Marthaler’s scathing – and infinitely more honest and humane – takedown of the original. By the end, Eliza and Higgins are an elderly, bickering couple: still together, but sick of the sight of one another. “You can only make someone suffer endlessly,” she says, “if they let you.”

Meine faire Dame: Ein Sprachlabor (My Fair Lady: A Language Laboratory) is more or less a jukebox musical, co-opting pop songs and opera alongside corrupted versions of Lerner and Loewe’s iconic ditties. The Swiss-German director sets the action in a blandly institutional 1970s language-lab, with five twitchily self-conscious pupils in cubicles chanting tongue-twisters back at Graham F. Valentine’s bitter, bullying and often blind-drunk Higgins. Behind them, a television screen shows the Queen sitting for a portrait and a shopping channel hawking foundation; outward appearances are apparently everything.

Eliza, at this point, speaks in horn-voiced explosive squawks, always too loud by half, that seem to burst out of her throat. Each sentence gets a look of distaste from Higgins. Everything she does is uncertain and ungainly. A flight of stairs poses particular problems – and draws some brilliant clowning from Carina Braunschmidt. During one group-therapy session, she offers a mawled rendition of Wham’s Last Christmas as a solo piece, to the tuneful laughter of those around her.

Mind you, her classmates are hardly smooth slicksters: one sweats profusely, another hacks up bits of apple. A duet of Silent Night gets an hilariously stilted dance routine of hip-swings and knee-bobs. Only when they excuse themselves for the privacy of the toilet (lavatory? restroom?), do they come out with something beautiful: exquisitely sung opera.

In these terms, Higgins is most certainly the villain and, at the production’s heart, is the command to look beyond surface ticks so as to live and live let. In the end, we’re all socially awkward, but some of us show it more than others. Of course, they end up running the show and setting themselves up as standard-bearers, forcing their own ways on others. “The rules are rules,” and that’s all there is to it. Ultimately, conformity – borderline fascistic as it is – is on trial here.

Marthaler’s production has too much going on to detail its every trick – its stretched sense of time is particularly remarkable – and yet, its main thrust is rather slim-line. As soon as you realise that this is a critique of Lerner and Loewe, the implicit social criticisms become fairly obvious. Nonetheless, it is genuinely hilarious – sometimes earned, sometimes by simple dint of Marthaler’s ballsy iconoclasm – and refreshing honest; a call to arms for the sweaty, stammering and socially-anxious screwballs of the world.

Photograph: Judith Schlosser