Review: My Fair Lady (Chichester Festival Theatre)

Review by Hywel Farrow-Wilton

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

All I want is for all shows to be as fantastic as this one. Wouldn’t it be loverly? What can I say to the cast and crew but: you did it! It’s wonderful that I’ve grown accustomed to seeing such marvellous quality from the Chichester Festival Theatre this year and, with a little bit of luck, hopefully that won’t be going away anytime soon. How fortunate for an ordinary man to have such a fantastic theatre just a short walk away from the street where he lives. Terrible puns aside, this is a simply exceptional production of the musical theatre classic My Fair Lady, featuring stunning costumes, hilarious performances, thrilling choreography and cock-e-nay accents galore. 

For those of you reading who have somehow made it to this website without ever hearing of My Fair Lady, firstly, how? And secondly, strap in for some musical theatre history. Written by the legendary composers Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, the show is an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. Premiering on Broadway in 1957, starring Rex Harrison as the famed phoneticist Professor Henry Higgins and Julie Andrews as the Covent Garden flower girl Eliza Doolittle, it was then famously adapted into a film starring Harrison and Twentieth Century icon Audrey Hepburn.

Set in London in 1912, My Fair Lady opens to find Higgins hanging around Covent Garden, secretly recording and analysing Doolittle’s cockney speech, remarking on how horrid he thinks the way she speaks is and considers it an affront to the English language. At the same time, he bumps into Colonel Pickering, who has just returned from India to meet Higgins, and bets him that he can’t take Doolittle and teach her to speak “Like a Duchess”. This sets in motion the main thrust of the plot, with Higgins and Pickering trying to teach Eliza how to speak and act like a lady. In the meantime, we meet a host of other characters, including Eliza’s father, the oft-drunk Alfred P. Doolittle and the earnestly romantic Freddy Eynsford-Hill. 

My Fair Lady  romps along so well that the three-hour run time is all but forgotten as the audience is thrust into a whirlwind of music, dance and linguistics, making it easy to see why the show and the songs have become so iconic. Every song is, to use the youth parlance, a banger. Whether it’s Eliza’s legendary solos, knees-up group numbers or Henry Higgins’ lyrically dense tongue-twisters, each captivates and puts a smile on the faces of the audience. Admittedly, I do think that the class politics at play in the show could be interpreted by some as problematic; indeed, Higgins’ misogynistic rants at Eliza do land awkwardly in a modern ear. However, I think those moments should not be judged solely by themselves, and when viewed within the wider context of the show, they work to show the complicated forces class plays on Edwardian society that we can still see in modern England today. 

Direction by Rachel Kavanaugh pays respect to the grand nature of the show whilst also embracing the eccentricities and potential awkwardness surrounding the language used and old-fashioned attitudes to class and relationships between men and women. For example, the number ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’ pulled out all the stops and was an absolute whopper of a moment full of musical theatre glee, spectacle and wonder deserving of a classic, helped by Stephen Mear’s fantastic choreography; whilst the blatant sexism in the song ‘A Hymn to Him’ was hilariously subverted by Higgins’ maids sharing glances and side-eyes at his ignorant statements whilst dressing him and serving him breakfast showing just how reliant he is on the women around him. 

A huge pat on the back needs to be given to Set and Costume Designer Peter McKintosh. The entire cast is gorgeously costumed, from the cockney street urchins in their woollen gloves and dirty dresses to the glorious morning suits and gowns worn during the Ascot section. McKintosh’s set is just as beautiful, especially Higgins’ laboratory, filled to the brim with various knick-knacks giving the air of a mad scientist rather than a respectable Professor. Additionally, the whole stage is on a revolve, giving a sense of instability and frantic panic when employed during Higgins’ song ‘I’m an Ordinary Man’, but also highlights the wealthy status of the ensemble during ‘Ascot Gavotte’. 

Sadly, I don’t quite have the time or the word count to shout out every member of the cast individually, but every single one was excellent in their performances, and it was joyful to see how much fun they all clearly had on stage.  It’s hard to believe this is Keziah Ibe’s professional debut as she was completely at ease in her performance as Eliza Doolittle, showing her transformation from a poor flower girl to a lady of the highest class marvellously. This is the second time I have seen Hadley Fraser on stage at Chichester this year, and no wonder he’s starred in the only two shows from the festival season that I have given five stars to… so far. His portrayal of Henry Higgins is hilarious, horrible and superbly brilliant. He somehow keeps the audience loving him whilst he says some of the most sexist insults to Eliza and acts like a spoilt teenager. Much like Jane Austen’s Emma, there is something innately endearing about seeing such an unlikable character be challenged and changed by the people around them. 

Equally hilarious was Gary Milner as Alfred P. Doolittle, who captured hearts and minds with his cheeky smiles and surprisingly acrobatic performances of ‘With a Little bit of Luck’ and ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’. These two performances are genuinely worth the ticket prices alone. Another stand-out performance came from Ben Culleton as Freddy Eynsford-Hill, who brought the house down with his rendition of ‘On the Street Where You Live’. Despite only having one song in the entire show, Ben Culleton manages to deliver one of the greatest performances of a solo song I have seen in a musical in a long time.

I’m unsure what else I could say to convince everyone reading this to book tickets other than to repeat that this classic has been revived in the most splendid manner and you absolutely must book to see it before the run is over. My Fair Lady has to be at the top of the must-see list this summer for any lover of musicals. Seemingly, there is nothing that can stop this show from being the hit of the summer, save a hurricane, but luckily, in West Sussex, they hardly ever happen.

My Fair Lady plays at the Chichester Festival Theatre until 5^th September 2026. Tickets from https://www.cft.org.uk/events/my-fair-lady

Photos by Johan Persson