TAMING THE 'ORRIBLE 'IGGINS

PYGMALION by George Bernard Shaw,

By William A. Henry III, TIME, 4 May 1987, pp. 107.

During an otherwise sedate tea party in the second act of Pygmalion, Peter O'Toole rises from a chair, stumbles into a fireplace screen with a jangling crash, whirls around to recover his balance, ensnares and dances with a grandfather clock, then ends by flinging himself into another chair and reclining silkily with a look of nothing having happened. The bare stage direction exists in George Bernard Shaw's text, but the moment -- and the + character judgment it reflects -- is in large part O'Toole's contribution to his literally smashing, if belated, Broadway debut at age 54, after nearly three decades of international fame and seven Oscar nominations (for films ranging from 1962's Lawrence of Arabia to 1982's My Favorite Year). On one level O'Toole is playing off public awareness of his decades-old reputation as a brawling, boozing boyo. As he puts it in an interview -- with a trademark rueful smile, offset by trademark wells of sadness in his deep blue eyes -- the message is, ''You've seen him drunk, now see him sober.''
The role he is enacting, Speech Scholar Henry Higgins, became virtually the personal property of Rex Harrison in the musical adaptation, My Fair Lady. Fans seeking a reprise of that winsome performance here will find far more of the imperious exterior with far less of the twinkly sugar daddy beneath. In O'Toole's view, the play is only outwardly about the civilizing of the street- corner flower seller Eliza Doolittle, who learns from '' 'iggins'' the speech and manner of a duchess. Underneath, he says, the play is about taming Higgins, a knowing product of the world of decorum and privilege who has never envisioned a place in it for himself. Perhaps the key line of dialogue is Higgins' tossed-off confession, ''I've never been able to feel really grown-up and tremendous, like other chaps.'' Says O'Toole: ''Eliza from the start yearns to join the social order. Higgins has neither the inclination to fit in nor the faith that he can.''
As sketched by Shaw, Higgins is catnip to women, capable of making them love him, generally at a safe platonic distance, while being anything but lovable. O'Toole has made a career of playing such disappointed idealists, sinning in the name of some principle. He triumphed in the role in London's West End in 1984. That production suffered, however, from a bland and uninteresting Eliza. On Broadway she is played by Tony Winner Amanda Plummer (Agnes of God), a ferocious comedian who can be just as exotically mannered as O'Toole.
The result could easily have been a mugging contest. Instead Plummer finds in Eliza a serene dignity and natural goodness that permeate even the character's most hyperkinetic moments and make her a perfect counterpoint to the low, aimless ''undeserving poor'' epitomized by Eliza's beguilingly frank rascal of a father, Alfred Doolittle (Sir John Mills).
The chief romance in Pygmalion is between O'Toole and his audience. O'Toole ! often pauses in three-quarter profile, displaying the blond mane that has edged imperceptibly toward silver, the classical beauty that seems enhanced rather than marred by a slightly lopsided jawline. His Higgins is a star turn in almost 19th century fashion -- at once shrewdly alert Shavianism and a brilliantly calibrated indulgence in boyish adorability.