Director Peter Hinton’s Contemporary Take On Pygmalion is a Bundle of Delights

   Photo. David Cooper. Jeff Meadows as Colonel Pickering, Harveen Sandhu as Eliza Doolittle and Patrick McManus as Henry Higgins in Pygmalion. Photo by David Cooper.

• NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — Linguistics genius Henry Higgins is lurking behind a pillar in London’s Covent Garden working madly away at his I-Pad.

Flower seller Eliza Doolittle is a feisty street urchin whose form-fitting blue jeans are so full of holes that you wonder whether they will last out the scene, not to mention the complete run of the Shaw Festival’s bold but exhilarating revival of Pygmalion.

This is definitely not Edwardian England we’re experiencing — not with a soundscape that includes Kanye West’s Runaway and Janet Jackson’s Got ‘Til It’s Gone, not with Henry Higgins’s female housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce, sporting a red tee shirt telling us all to “keep calm.”

Indeed the latter exhortation is sound advice for any purists ready to throw up their hands in horror over director Peter Hinton’s temerity in giving Bernard Shaw’s classic comedy about class and culture an unabashedly contemporary setting. The truth of the matter is that Pygmalion settles with surprising ease into the world of 2015 — indeed, many of its concerns acquire a renewed edge as Hinton and his terrific cast unfold their beguiling but provocative tale about a linguistics professor who takes a humble flower girl in hand and turns her into a lady.

Besides, Hinton also reminds us of a few pertinent matters concerning the play in a note in the printed program. He points out that the gap between wealth and poverty is far greater now in England than it was in 1914, the year of Pygmalion’s premiere — so, if anything, its underlying social concerns are more valid than they were a century ago. Furthermore, there’s the interesting revelation that Shaw kept revising and modernizing the play during his lifetime, and in the film version, for which he won an Oscar, he set it firmly in the England of 1938.

Hinton has opted for Shaw’s original text, trusting in its transferability and durability, and restricting his modernization to a bit of tweaking as it relates to “concordances of money values and places.” Set designer Eo Sharp’s vision of Covent Garden Market evokes both past and present: the architecture is still recognizably Covent Garden, albeit somewhat grubbier, but the food stalls are gone. And Christina Poddubiuk’s costumes contribute to a sense of bustling, thoroughly contemporary street life.

When we move on to Higgins’s Wimpole Street studio, we certainly don’t encounter a traditional book-lined study: instead, it’s a high-tech emporium with a computer screen glowing away on the desk and electronic paraphernalia cramming the shelves. It’s the perfect venue for a Henry Higgins who — in Patrick McManus’s richly entertaining performance — tends to obsess about the culture he has built around himself and is wearing shorts and tennis shoes when Eliza shows up on his doorstep to ask for elocution lessons. The casual cardigan-sweatered elegance of the Higgins immortalized by Rex Harrison and Leslie Howard is little in evidence here. This Higgins is a bit scruffy — his idea of a night in the town is to don a set of rumpled tweeds, a flaming red scarf and a bicycle helmet and rattle off somewhere on his two-wheeler.

Yet, he remains the arrogant, self-absorbed, insensitive genius that Shaw originally created a century ago. Furthermore, we can’t accuse McManus of making the Higgins of today too much the non-conformist. Throughout the play’s various incarnations — from its premiere a century ago through to My Fair Lady — the good professor has always been indifferent to the social conventions of the day. And this we welcome. At his worst, he’s the quintessential bull in the china shop — and we delight in the spectacle. McManus’s Higgins has simply moved with the times.

He is an impressively versatile actor. Shaw’s witty, sometimes cutting lines are safe with him. So is his dexterity with a sight gag: McManus is very good at tripping over furniture. It’s trickier to convey the image of a towering intellect, but it’s present — as it is in the lovably exasperating character of Sheldon, the genius physicist of The Big Bang Theory. When McManus’s Higgins lectures Eliza on the glories of the English language, we’re conscious of a powerful and passionate mind at work. As for emotional complexity and, dare we mention it, vulnerability — that will come to us as well as the evening progresses.

Harveen Sandhu is the production’s splendid Eliza — a street-smart urchin with an instinct for survival and a nose for cant and hypocrisy. She’s also vulnerable — but in a different way from Higgins who is too arrogant to acknowledge any frailty in his make-up until the end.

There’s a great moment in this production when Eliza, having been transformed by Higgins into the lady of her dreams, has passed the test of attending a great ball. It’s now around midnight, and she enters Higgins’s darkened studio, a mythic vision of loveliness in a stunning white gown. Yet her very silence and body language hint at some kind of profound sorrow. The background music here is an almost unbearably poignant passage from Ralph Vaughn William’s Tallis Fantasia and it suddenly stops at that emotionally crucial moment when Higgins and his friend Col. Pickering show up, basking in self-congratulation over their success at passing this humble flower girl off as an upper-class beauty at a major society event.

The ensuing confrontation between Higgins and Eliza, now conscious that her reborn image is built on sand, is one of Shaw’s most famous scenes. At its most basic, it raises uncomfortable questions about the place of women in a class-ridden culture — a theme that also threads its way through the festival’s two other late June openings — Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and J.M. Barrie’s The Twelve-Pound Look. When an anguished Eliza asks Higgins what’s to become of her, and he responds with uncomprehending disdain, the play’s moral concerns become insistent.

Sandhu’s transition from chirpy street-smart flower girl to the fulfilment of Henry Higgins’s vision is beautifully managed. But she also succeeds in conveying Eliza’s essential constancy — she remains her own person. So her moment of despair does not last. In the very last scene it’s her resilient spirit that triumphs.

It could be that this production will rekindle the debate about colour-blind casting. One hopes not. True, festival veteran Peter Krantz, who delivers a robust and engaging performance as Eliza’s dustman father, Alfred P. Doolittle, seems notably light-skinned in comparison with his daughter — but so what? We never meet Eliza’s mother, and this is the year 2015 when there are plenty of offspring of mixed relationships. What matters is that Harveen Sandhu inhabits the role of Eliza with spirit and conviction. She’s a real find.

Mary Haney is a delight as Higgins’s no-nonsense housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce. Jeff Meadows is a trifle bland as Col. Pickering, but he does strike the right note with Eliza, treating her with a degree of kindness and courtesy that seems alien to Higgins. Donna Belleville turns the role of Higgins’s forbearing mother into a Mary Quant fashion designer. She’s a joy whenever she’s on stage — but is that really the face of Prince Charles on her trendy tee shirt? Again, who cares? This Pygmalion offers a bundle of delights.

(Pygmalion continues at the Shaw Festival until Oct. 24. Ticket information at 1 800 511 SHAW or shawfest.com)