Pygmalion

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

What the devil is someone supposed to do with this line: "Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oo"? That yodel of vowels belongs to Eliza Doolittle, the Covent Garden flower girl who would be transformed through elocution and style into a duchess. Expressing both awe and distress, Charlie Murphy's knock-out, layered performance makes Eliza's catchphrase sound like a cat choking on a trombone; a sound that is first amusing, then moving and somehow never grating. That is also the great achievement of Annabelle Comyn's tremendous new production of Pygmalionfor the Abbey.

We all know the story. The astonishingly supercilious phonetician, Henry Higgins (a sublimely spry and brusque Risteárd Cooper) bets his colleague Colonel Pickering (Nick Dunning) that he can transform a girl of humble status into royalty with scant regards for social and emotional consequences. It is a narrative as full of romantic fantasy as horror: Kate Middleton meets Frankenstein.

George Bernard Shaw could never quite reconcile his didactic satire on class barriers, moral equivocation and the stifling of female independence with something as pleasing as a hit show. But Comyn can. In outline, the production sounded like a similar wager: that with enough work on crystal-cut intonation and sumptuous costumes from Peter O’Brien, the national theatre could pass itself off as the Gate. Instead, it uses all the resources of the Abbey – considered casting, impeccable voice direction, technical capacity, money – to provide the luxurious pleasure of spectacle and a pitch-perfect ensemble to plumb Shaw’s ideas for all they’re worth.

In a play where everything is judged on appearance (a gentleman is recognised by his boots not his manners), Paul O’Mahony’s set plays delightful games with surface. The filing boxes of Higgins’ study climb to impossible reaches, a scientific obsession rendered toweringly absurd. There is a tendency to show off: an early set change, covered by the sly, clever chatter in Philip Stewart’s music, seems like an ad for the Abbey’s “exceptionally elaborate machinery”, as does Eliza’s bathing scene, which the excellent Fiona Bell conducts with the tenderness of waterboarding.

Such moments emphasise the cruelty of the “experiment” and for all the delicious mirth Lorcan Cranitch finds in Doolittle, a contented member of the “undeserving poor”, or the entertainment of Cooper’s irascible propulsion, Comyn wisely leads their sardonic logic and arias of abuse into flashes of violent intent.

Could Shaw be as blunt? “He uses the English language like a truncheon,” Max Beerbohm once said, and when the fifth act curdles into exhaustive disputation, you wonder again if some things are better left unsaid. The most tragic impression in this accomplished production is Eliza’s silence, the most comic her robotic high society debut, the most triumphant the regaining of her spirit. Balancing the surface charm and heady substance of Pygmalion is no easy challenge. But – as Shaw never put it – by George, I think they’ve got it.

Runs until June 11