Sheffield Daily Telegraph – Friday 17 February 1928

The Swinton Players.

Performance of Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion.”

In choosing “Pygmalion” for their third production of season, this enterprising company followed, we are told, the advice of a clergyman. How the Church is moving on or is it Mr Shaw that is moving on? Fifteen years ago, if you had been told that a clergyman had recommended “Pygmalion” or any other Shaw play, you would have replied derisively “Not —’’ well, you would have replied that it seemed improbable.

But now, Swinton, Pygmalion played with an ecclesiastical benediction. And it is played in a Church Hall. The Swinton Players rather specialise in Shaw. They have given three of his major plays, and two of the shorter ones. We have heard it seriously argued that the acting of Shaw tends to diminish the capacity of actors for acting anything else, just as singing in Wagner develops inability sing in other operas. (Operatic perforators always’ speak of singing their parts ; not, for obvious reasons, of acting them.)

I have never seen the force this argument, and anyhow they tell us that at Swinton, Shaw infallibly gets across. Even if the play itself does not specially appeal to an audience the dialogue always does. Besides, “Pygmalion” is one of the few pieces in which Mr. Shaw seems have deliberately laid himself out to show that he can write a comedy. There is a didactic clement in it, of course; but the didacticism is in a minor key, never assertive or ’obtrusive, and the essentially comic central idea worked out very much as it might have been more orthodox dramatist who had been clever enough to think of it. It was clear from the outset (or almost from outset, for the first. Act is very tricky stuff) that the Swinton Players understood their material and knew how to treat it. They knew, also, how to treat their audience.

The curtain went up to the moment, the intervals were short, and there were no hitches. The settings were skilfully economical, with just enough detail to convey the significance of the scene, and with plenty of room for movement on the small stage. Perhaps there was not enough movement, for the tempo of the piece seemed slow and yet the clock it went along at a lively pace. Insufficiency of movement slows up the apparent tempo of a piece every bit as much as deliberateness of speech.

The actors had achieved a quiet and natural style of conversation, so subdued that one wondered at times whether their voices would carry to the back of the hall. But evidently they did, for the points the dialogue were not missed —except when the talking was in the exaggerated and now almost obsolete Cockney dialect which Mr. Shaw inflicts upon Eliza and Alfred Doolittle. Will some producer have the audacity to modify this, and make Eliza and Alfred talk illiterate but intelligible London English?

The most conspicuous acting success of the night was that of Miss Margaret Harrison as Eliza. Her comedy in the drawing-room scene was capital, and her touches of emotion in the scene that followed were conveyed with force and yet with no undue stress. The ladies, indeed, were all very good, particularly Miss May Roebuck as Mrs. Higgins, and Miss Emily Wressell the housekeeper. Mr. Jack C. Wilkinson interpreted the detachment of Professor Higgins with skill and understanding, but he rather under-acted the Professor’s asperity. Mr. Laurie Rowlands, as the egregious Alfred, was encumbered on his first appearance by that confounded Cockney accent; in the last Act he was able shed some of it, and entered with a rare and efficient zest into the humours of the part. Mr. Frank ard bore himself with dignity as Colonel Pickering.

The piece had been well rehearsed: characters moved confidently when they did move, and it was very seldom that the promoter was allowed have anything to with the proceedings. Our compliments to the Swinton Players on a very spirited and I successful undertaking