Never mind posh, she can't do cockney

10 April 2012

Martine McCutcheon, an actress of sorts, went to scow in 'Ackney (where hurricanes hardly ever happen) and at the ige of ite determined that to play Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady must be her life's ambishun. In Doolittle she says all - the Doo as multi-syllabled as a Korean car manufacturer, the double t of little elided as a double glottal stop, and in spite of all her years at the Italia Conti School - which used to be the guarantee of metamorphosed elocution - her speech remains utterly unreconstructed and fits her only for minor roles in EastEnders and The Bill.

Why, then, did the panjandrums of the National Theatre imagine that under their tutelage, embodied in Bernard Shaw's Professor Higgins, the real Martine could summon wit enough to be effectively transformed into the fictional Eliza reincarnate as a lady?

She has, it must be said, no ear for the role that translates her from EastEnders to Absolutely Fabulous. Forced to mimic the exaggerated caterwauling established as iconic by Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn, she is scarcely intelligible and wholly unconvincing even as a cockney - a remarkable achievement - nor does she comfortably assume in tongue or body language the airs and graces of gentility.

Within five minutes it is evident that the fault lies mainly with the voice, a meagre little instrument incapable of volume, done serious disservice by random amplification that would disgrace a village hall. High in pitch and shrill in timbre, her utterance is painful to the ear. At her best this actress is inaudible, at her worst her speech is alternately and gracelessly whining, vituperative and rancorous, her song so sour that she might be Florence Foster Jenkins attempting the most rancid notes of Callas at the tail end of her career, heard through the customer announcement system of London Underground.

This is a woman who, as a cockney, sings a song of which the refrain is something about a wooden tit (she has a birdcage); as a lady she trills that she could have darned all night, but with not an old sock to be seen. Disappointed and resentful at the end, she abandons the bogus mannerisms of the Ada Unsworth School of Elocution - "How now, brown cow?" and all that - and delivers her last diatribe with the soft Welsh delivery of Merthyr Tydfil.

The audience gave her a standing ovation, but then the men were balding and greybeard drab, the women Linda Snell and the Vicar of Dibley clad in Marks and Spencer fashion pink, deaf and blind to Miss McCutcheon's blatant inadequacies, all instead reliving Audrey Hepburn's triumph of 1964 with the voice of Marni Nixon. Dennis Waterman is genuine and wonderful as Eliza's father, and Bernard Shaw seems as sharp and shrewd and wry as a century ago, but no matter how well played the other roles, the energetic, even thrilling, support of minor players, My Fair Lady stands or falls on its Eliza. In Miss McCutcheon, this production suffers a mortal self-inflicted wound.

My Fair Lady

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