Since he burst into view in the late 1980s as the scheming scamp Gloumov in Too Clever by Half, the actor Alex Jennings has shown a particular ability to embody both the angel and the devil. It serves him in good stead as he takes over from Jonathan Pryce as Professor Henry Higgins, who sets out to prove that he can pluck a flower girl off the streets and within six months pass her off as a duchess. After he has done with phonetics, Higgins is the kind of man who would move on to eugenics without pausing for breath.
Based on Shaw's Pygmalion, to which lyricist and composer Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe lent a romantic gloss and opportunities for lots of very nice cossies, My Fair Lady shouldn't by rights work at all, since Higgins is slightly less enlightened and about as attractive an example of the male of the species as Attila the Hun. That it does simply proves that we are all suckers for the square-jawed, unreconstructed hero of romantic fictions from Jane Eyre to Mills and Boon. And that Jennings is a very fine actor indeed - too good for this kind of handsome, well-produced, but ever so long and ever so slightly dreary night out in the West End.
Jennings's real gift has always been for comedy, and here he cuts both Higgins's monstrousness and his teddy-bear cuteness (all growl and no bite) with a sense of irony that suggests the man might actually be faintly aware of his own ridiculousness. This Higgins is constantly running his hands through his hair, which might merely signify a bad case of nits brought on by proximity to the working classes, but also conveys something of the puzzlement of the Edwardian gentleman who belatedly realises that he has fossilised while the world around him has changed.
Elsewhere, Trevor Nunn's production plays it so tediously straight that you long for Joanna Riding's Eliza to do something useful, such as join a Marxist reading group or sign up for the suffragettes. Dance all night? No: put your feet up and rewind the movie version.
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