From Harry Houdini to Henry Higgins on the Chichester stage
Hadley Fraser is back for his second major role of the Chichester Festival Theatre summer – and oddly his second successive HH at the CFT.
But there is a vast gulf between Harry Houdini in Magic, the opening play of the season, and Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, the big summer musical.
“I had been offered Magic quite some time before,” Hadley says, “and funnily enough it was at the photo shoot for the poster for Magic that I spoke to (CFT artistic director) Justin and I asked him what the rest of the season was looking like. He said that they were doing this and that and so on but that they were also doing My Fair Lady. And I remember thinking that I just really wanted to play Henry Higgins but I wasn't so presumptuous that I was going to put myself forward in that moment!
“But then it was serendipity really. I had a call from my agent saying that (My Fair Lady director) Rachel Kavanaugh was wanting to talk to me about Henry Higgins, and one of the first questions I asked was ‘Do you think I will be able to do two shows at Chichester in one year?’
“But it is really one of my favourite places to come. It is the standard that I love. It's not a bellicose drumbeat, beating the standard into you. It's just the culture and the atmosphere that comes from the top down. There is such a collegiate atmosphere. The facilities are great and you've got two great spaces making new work. There's such a festival atmosphere and there is such a great enjoyment. And you always come across interesting people. It's the National Theatre by the sea and it still feels like that. I'm always really very, very happy to come down here.”
As for Magic: “The moment I read it I just thought it was fascinating. And you've got the fact that it's from real life. And there's the fact that you've got these two great men from their age (Conan Doyle and Houdini) who were so famous and so fascinating but who had such conflicting personalities and such conflicting life missions. They were so obsessed with one another and with other things that they could not reconcile.”
It was a great play to do, and who knows, it might reappear: “You know as much about that as I do!” Hadley says.
But in the meantime, the focus is My Fair Lady running until Saturday, September 5.
“Mine is a purely subjective take on Henry Higgins. He can be played in so many different ways, just like all the great parts can be. But I think within the DNA of the character you have got this very intelligent, very brilliant man who is very socially inept. He is a bit of an evolutionary dead end. But within him you have got this character who is also capable of great fun and great charm.
“I think if you look at him through a modern lens there is something maybe a little bit on the neurodivergent spectrum about him and some things to suggest that he has suffered from some sort of depression. But then that is eclipsed when this incredible woman walks into his life.”
Higgins famously and cruelly dismisses Eliza Doolittle as a “squashed cabbage leaf.”
“We had to think about the misogyny in the play and how we deal with that and make it more palatable. We did a lot of thinking about that. But her journey, the transformation in Eliza, his effect on her is the engine of the piece. That journey for her is very, very vivid – whereas for him, Henry is almost exactly the same man for the first 98 per cent of the play. It's in the final two per cent of the play that he has this incredible moment of the dawn breaking for him. And you have to take that as sincere on his part. Otherwise the drama falls down.”