‘He’s unbelievably sexist’: Brit TV star tackles his toughest role yet

Despite having won some of Britain and America’s highest theatre awards, and performing opposite Helen Mirren and Dustin Hoffman, Nathaniel Parker has never sung on stage.

That’s all about to change: the English actor best-known to Australian audiences for his roles in the BBC’s The Inspector Lynley Mysteries and Merlin is set to make his musical theatre debut in My Fair Lady in Sydney next month.

“I’m like a kid in a comedy store. This is a whole new game,” he says. “This is like, I don’t know, it’s like a promotion towards the end of my career.”

Playing Eliza Dolittle is Melbourne-based Claire Lyon, no stranger to musical theatre. Best known for playing Christine in The Phantom of the Opera, the soprano says it’s the role of a lifetime. She spends 85 per cent of the show on stage and must master not only a Cockney accent but that of a plummy English toff as well. Luckily, her mum and grandparents are from north London, so something of the accent is in her DNA.

My Fair Lady tells the story of a flower seller on the streets of London being “discovered” by professor of phonetics Henry Higgins, who makes a bet with a friend that he can transform her from a poor commoner into a duchess.

Over the years, the show has been criticised for being misogynistic; back home in England when Parker talked about playing Higgins, several people described the character as exactly that. But the 64-year-old disagrees.

“I think that’s the wrong word,” he says. “He’s sexist, unbelievably sexist. The most sexist man I’ve ever played – and I played Henry VIII for two years [in the stage adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall books]. But he doesn’t hate women. He doesn’t hate his mother, he doesn’t hate Mrs Pearce. He just doesn’t understand the first thing about them, so he’s kept them at a distance.”

That said, Parker admits he is “still figuring out the way to say those awfully sexist lines” that come up. “I can feel myself being punched by various friends of mine,” he says. “I think the reason he gets that extreme is because he doesn’t understand the turmoil inside that this woman has caused.”

Lyon argues that the musical, which is based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, written in 1913 at the height of the Suffragette movement, was created and is set in a very different era and should be honoured as an historical work of art, not altered to suit contemporary norms.

When she and Parker spoke with Dame Julie Andrews (who at 20 played Eliza in the original Broadway version) via Zoom last week, they discussed its origins.

“Things have been tweaked for sure, but I think of Eliza as an incredibly strong young woman. She’s a fighter. She speaks her mind,” Lyon says. “She stands up to a man who is in a different class to her, who’s her senior, and she holds her own. She fights back, and wins him over in the end.”

Australian stage royalty Reg Livermore and Robyn Nevin also appear in the much-loved musical, as Alfred P. Doolittle and Mrs Higgins respectively, with Tony Llewellyn-Jones as Colonel Hugh Pickering. Anne Wood plays Mrs Pearce, David Whitney is Karpathy, and Freddy Hellier makes his main stage musical theatre debut as Freddy Eynsford-Hill.

For Parker and Lyon, My Fair Lady is one of the best musicals ever written. It nails all the key components; the writing, the songs and the choreography, not to mention the costumes, are glorious, says Lyon. It’s a feast for the ears, a feast for the eyes and great for the soul, she adds.

Classic numbers include Wouldn’t It Be Loverly, The Rain in Spain, I Could Have Danced All Night and Higgins’ infamous Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?

When the Lerner and Loewe production premiered on Broadway in 1956 starring Andrews as Eliza and Rex Harrison as Higgins, it was an instant hit, winning six Tony Awards. Audrey Hepburn starred in the lead role in the 1964 film version, with Harrison again as the professor; ghost singer Marni Nixon sang Hepburn’s songs.

Now celebrating its 70th anniversary, the show is directed by Karen Johnson Mortimer; it is presented by Opera Australia and John Frost.

Parker quips that none of his songs are well-known because Harrison spoke rather than sang them in his portrayals. The British veteran of stage and screen no doubt hopes that will change when Australian audiences see him make his musical debut, the first time in decades he’s sung outside his dressing room.

My Fair Lady is at the Sydney Opera House from September and Arts Centre Melbourne from November. Details: opera.org.au