CONGRATULATIONS on your 150th birthday, Mr Bernard Shaw, and thank you for giving the Theatre Royal the perfect excuse to revive your dazzling yet damning comedy of manners.

Pygmalion, the windier forerunner to the soft-centred My Fair Lady, is a meticulous summer production from artistic director Damian Cruden, who has corralled the cream of theatrical forces.

The purposeful stride to Christopher Madin's beautiful music sets the tone; the spacious, deep set designs of Siobhan Ferrie are classical and elegant, from the pillars of Covent Garden to the spiralling library ladder, while the imposing library doors comment wittily on the social divide.

Ferrie's costumes are better still: browns for David Leonard's Henry Higgins; crisp colonial whites for Robert Pickavance's Colonel Pickering; candy stripes for Henry Luxemburg's foppish Freddy Eynsford Hill; amber for Clare Corbett's Clara Eynsford Hill.

Sarah Quintrell is a picture in flower-girl rags, silk kimono or party trim as Eliza Doolittle is changed by science not nature into a duchess.

She tops all this with a white dress and red cape, which mirrors the all-consuming eyes that pop out of the red roses in Boris Cruse's back projection as she completes her Faking It journey from pigeon to swan.

Cruse's video inserts work best when used like film credits, but the large looming figures of a carriage driver and a bobby are playful, but somewhat silly.

The central casting is a delight, even if the energy is flat in Shaw's notoriously wordy and suddenly worthy fifth act, by which time the sense of inadequacy has been transferred from Higgins's social experiment, Eliza, to the professor himself.

Quintrell's transformation of accent and physical manner and yet retention of her character's determination pluck the heart and her New talk scene is rightly greeted with spontaneous applause; Leonard travels less far from a familiar base, but with a typically light comic touch, mixing ego and insecurity, coin-jangling agitation and languor with a wasp-sting tongue.

Mark White's pushy Alfred Doolittle and Christine Cox's crisply assured matriarch Mrs Higgins add to the fun and serious games before Shaw's need for social comment deadens the ending.

Today, his metaphor for change would be plastic surgery, not phonetics, blowing things out of all proportion as it were.

This Pygmalion, however, is perfectly shaped by Damian Cruden, and your summer season would be incomplete without it.

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