A Play, A Pie, and A Pint may have finished for the summer, but Oran Mor's lunchtime theatre programme continues apace for the next four weeks with this mini-season of cut-down classics.
Getting the ball rolling is Sandy Nelson's take on Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw's class comedy about social engineering and female emancipation, in which professor of phonetics Henry Higgins accepts a wager that he can make common flower girl Eliza Doolittle pass for a duchess merely by teaching her to speak properly.
For this adaptation, Nelson and director Liz Carruthers have made an inspired decision to relocate the action to turn-of-the-20th-century Edinburgh, with Eliza now hailing from Falkirk, rather than being born within the sound of Bow Bells. And a thoroughly entertaining treat it is too.
Sure, Shaw might be turning in his grave at the use of Scotticisms such as "on the batter", but the play really is in good hands here, the Shavian polemic intact. There is a hilarious scene about the "undeserving poor" that will have you in stitches, and the comedy is enriched by the use of Scots language, every bit as much as it is by the absolutely terrific performances from the three-strong cast.
Steven McNicoll is perfectly cast as the bullying, bumptious Higgins, who realises too late that his creation no longer needs him, while Rebecca Elise simply shines as Eliza from start to finished article. As for the multi-tasking Nelson, of the three roles he undertakes with aplomb, Henry's mother, sideburns and all, gets my vote. As Eliza might say: " A real stoatir of a show, don't you know."
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