Meine Faire Dame - - ein Sprachlabor

Synopsis

Returning from a conference on southern English accents, Hungarian linguist Professor Karpathy finds an enormous bouquet of flowers waiting for him. Aghast, he finds a note scribbled in blood-red ink with a very sinister message in the form of a threatening riddle, Who could have sent it? Is his secret cover blown? He only has until midnight to solve the mystery or fact the consequences...... Delightfully witty and (very) loosely based on My Fair Lady, Meine faire Dame is set in a language laboratory where its characters attempt to learn English from a very eccentric professor - with a secret to hide.

Our Review:

15 August 2012

Swiss director Christoff Marthaler's Meine Faire Dame is very much a *version* of Lerner and Loewe's 1956 musical. By which I mean; take pretty much everything you know about My Fair Lady and throw it away.

I think about three or four songs from the original survive into this staging, and they are mostly given pretty short shrift. "Why Can't The English Speak English" is delivered as speech; "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face" becomes three lines of drunken sprawl; "I Could Have Danced All Night" is sarcastically delivered as a rapid, fairground hammond organ jingle.

Then there's the setting: a large, sixties-architecture language lab, with polystyrene ceiling tiles and cheap wooden and plasterboard walls. The performers don't really take *parts* as such; well, the cast's only British performer, Graham F Valentine, is pretty much "playing" Prof. Henry Higgins, although th...

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Latest User Review

Gayle - 21 August 2012:

If watched as asketch show this was very good, the singing was great, the acting very good and although slapstick, the humour did come through. However, it really didn't tie together. Go with managed expectations and you wont be disappointed....

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