Tim Pigott-Smith

Tim Pigott-Smith as Professor Higgins

Tim Pigott-Smith needs scant introduction to British theater and TV buffs who will find the busy actor donning a Shavian cap at the Old Vic this summer when he opens as Higgins in Peter Hall's production of Shaw's Pygmalion, which was rapturously received last summer at the Theatre Royal, Bath. No stranger to Hall's work, Pigott-Smith regularly appeared at the National Theatre during Hall's tenure, starting with Stephen Poliakoff's Coming In To Land, opposite Maggie Smith, and as Octavius Caesar in Hall's now-legendary Antony and Cleopatra, alongside Anthony Hopkins and Judi Dench. He was the hapless Larry Slade in the marathon Kevin Spacey-led revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, which first played the Almeida Theatre and then the Old Vic before alighting to rave reviews at Broadway’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre in April 1999; the actor received an Outer Critics Circle nomination for his performance. But for devotees of the epic small-screen mini-series, Pigott-Smith will be forever known for his work as the morally dubious Ronald Merrick in The Jewel In the Crown—the only character to appear in all 14 episodes of the 1984 Granada TV adaptation of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. Pigott-Smith spoke to Broadway.com late one recent morning about the legacy of that role, working with Kevin Spacey, and why Shaw sings, even without Lerner and Loewe to transform Pygmalion into My Fair Lady.

I'm fascinated by how hard the British are on Shaw, even though he seems to be enjoying a serious resurgence of interest: your production has been fantastically reviewed out of town, and we've had both Major Barbara and Saint Joan storming the National of late.
I think he just goes in and out of fashion and, let's face it, later Shaw can be really hard work. I don't think he writes working-class people well, though the exception, of course, is Doolittle, the father and dustman in our play: that's a creation of absolute genius. But his later work is often, well, just a bit dry. You feel as if his characters are working from the head down and not from the feet up. That’s not true of Mrs. Warren’s Profession and it’s not true of Widowers’ Houses, but there are areas of Saint Joan where it is true: people get worried that it’s dull, though at the same time his characters fizz with such terrific intellectual energy. The trick is to release that.

Tim Pigott-Smith in Pygmalion

Well, Tom Stoppard is often accused of being too dry, and no one gives him a hard time—or at least not this degree.
I think my favorite of Stoppard’s plays, The Real Thing, is absolutely bursting with feeling. The thing as I say is to release the intellectual energy and then the people begin to take care of themselves; if you haven’t got a fairly sharp mind, the characters can remain a bit dead.

Which in turn places real responsibility, presumably, on the director.
Yes, and Peter [Hall] has been extraordinary on this production. He’s been working from the ground up from the beginning and has always had a very,very strong line on this play. He’s always seen it as fundamentally based in social reality, so that you look at the flower girls in act one as a stroke away from being prostitutes and then you work up to Eliza’s father, who’s a dustman, and Mrs. Pearce, who’s a working woman, and the Eynsford-Hills who have money but no real income, and then Higgins who’s an extremely successful working professor and the Colonel, who has an independent retirement pension and then Mrs. Higgins—you’ve got the entire social spectrum. The play is absolutely based on a social reality in which you see a man perform a pretty disgraceful social experiment, which is to take someone from her class and change her, which gives it an element of tragedy.

Indeed. The question is has Eliza actually benefited from this makeover?
The play asks what is to become of her—what is going to happen to this woman, who has been given a façade but no means of an income? She asks Higgins, “What am I to do? I have no friends except you and the Colonel: what is to become of me?” But he feels as if he’s given her absolutely everything. He says to her when he’s upset that he’s given her his intimacy, as well; he’s absolutely given her his soul.

Tim Pigott-Smith in Pygmalion

That’s assuming that Higgins has a soul to give.
I think of Higgins as a little boy who’s never grown up. I think he has had sexual relationships but his problem with Eliza is that he’s absolutely in love with her but he’s in love with her as a statue, a creation, and he can’t bridge the gap between the creation and the woman. He recognizes his own shortcomings in the course of the play. I think that’s what Shaw was writing about: two men, Higgins and the Colonel, who have spent their lives in forms of boys’ clubs, which at that time were particularly prevalent. Shaw was really poking fun at these undeveloped male chauvinists, and, of course, he’s writing at the time of the suffragette movement.

So the play works, then, as itself, without needing to be My Fair Lady?
We do have that cloud, which we call the F-word [laughs], hanging over us. But Shaw wrote a very long epilogue—why use one word when 30,000 will do?—in which he’s very positive and adamant that Freddy is the future and that Eliza must not marry Higgins. He is quite adamant that they don’t come together, and in fact he rewrote the ending several times. Our ending is quite sad and quite bleak. She says very clearly, “I’m off, and I shan’t see you again,” and he doesn’t understand. She realizes that she has some knowledge now that she can teach other people, and she says, “I’ll marry Freddy, I will, as soon as I’m able to support him.” I think Eliza and Higgins will see each other again, but there’s no question of an independent relationship.

It must be lovely for you to be doing Pygmalion at an Old Vic run by Kevin Spacey, whom you obviously know well from your extended time together in The Iceman Cometh on both sides of the Atlantic.
I still remember discovering that when Kevin was 13 he was brought over by his parents to London and he saw me playing in Sherlock Holmes at the Aldwych, as Dr. Watson, in 1973 or ’74: his love of theater is very deep-rooted and goes back a long way. I think it was very astute of Sally Greene to recognize that Kevin was someone who was in love with proper theater and that, wonderful as Broadway can be, the real home of proper theater is still England. It is one of the things we do best, and someone with Kevin’s real love of it is bound to gravitate towards it. I’m already wondering what’s going to happen to the Old Vic when he leaves: will it turn into a lap dancing club? I think we owe him a huge debt.

But of course your own commitment to theater has been very real, and lifelong, even if I bet Merrick in Jewel In the Crown remains for many your defining performance.
That’s still my calling card. I love the stage but it’s hard work, and I don’t get any younger. [Pigott-Smith has just turned 62.] I feel lucky that we carry on—my wife, Pamela Miles, is also an actress and she’s playing Mrs. Eynsford-Hill in Pygmalion. I have a very nice career, and I hope it pootles on. That’s one of the nice things about being an actor: you never have to retire.