REVIEW: My Fair Lady at Chichester Festival Theatre - A global star is born in this brilliant, breath-taking 'Loverly' musical

It was a foregone conclusion that the audience would rise to their feet as one at the end of the press night in an act of unanimous and shared adulation.

From the opening few seconds set on the steps of Covent Garden, the sheer quality and brilliance of this production and its cast radiated throughout the Chichester Festival Theatre and beyond.

Despite spurious claims to the contrary, you might not be able to see any man-made feature on Earth from Space – but I have a suspicion that the sheer joy of My Fair Lady can be felt across the Milky Way. It’s power is limitless.

West End theatres will be lining up to give it a home after it completes its run here.

If Audrey Hepburn’s film portrait of Eliza Doolittle – the impoverished flower girl passed off as a duchess as a bet between two linguistic scholars – was regarded as beyond compare; then without doubt this stage interpretation will establish Keziah Ibe as a star.

The CFT’s Half A Sixpence helped launch Charlie Stemp’s stellar career.

Ten years later, here is Keziah making her professional debut on the same stage. It is a performance – acting and singing – of beguiling complexity and breath-taking magnificence.

But there are no rogues in this production. Hadley Fraser brings an energy and dynamism which eluded Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins. That mercurial passion that sees him leap from the furniture underscores the character’s inner turmoil of the change imposed on another suddenly infecting him.

Bernard Shaw plotted this masterpiece more than a century ago. His 1912 Pygmalion was the product of an English society riven by male superiority and rigid class divides.

So when Fraser reprises those words ‘why can’t a woman be more like a man’ and recounts in lyric the disasters that befall you if you ‘let a woman in your life’ then the context is an arguably different world.

Today the duchess is more likely to seek refuge in the guise of a flower-seller than the other way around.

But this is a play for which class and chauvinism are not the key proponents. The theme is the enduring one of seeking to change someone else immune to the impact it will have on them – or you.

So Higgins and Colonel Pickering (Tony Jayawardena) are complicit in a bet to take this flower seller with her screeching, squawking voice and her manners of the street and pass her off within six months as someone completely different.

There are no subversive sexual motives but their indifference to her as a human being is transparent none the less.

Add to the mix, her binman father’s unique morality (Gary Milner deservedly gets the applause due for his Alfred P Doolittle) and the pining adulation of Freddy Eynsford-Hill (Ben Culleton’s vocals are off the scale) and the magnitude of this theatrical triumph is laid bare.

The men don’t get it all their own way of course. Look out for Belinda Lang’s pitch perfect Mrs Higgins who despairs of her son and rejoices in the lessons that Eliza finally teaches him; and Finty Williams’ Mrs Pearce who strikes the perfect balance between professional housekeeper and icy critic of her employer’s personal techniques.

The songs and the music roll through the three hours like a sparkling river in full flood. Every one a winner and an intrinsic part of the lives of audiences of a certain age.

Costumes, set designs, choreography … it’s all flawless. Director Rachel Kavanaugh nails it totally with pace and pathos.

CFT Artistic Director Justin Audibert knows how important the reputation of the theatre’s summer musical is.

To produce something of this calibre tells the region its most precious theatre is in the hands of a genius.