Graham Valentine cuts a striking dash as he enters the room. Taller
than tall, the way he eyes you up and down with hawkish appraisal gives
him the air of an eccentric school-master who's just caught you out
doing something you shouldn't. This may have something to do with the
perfectly odd match of the green tweed suit off-set by a shock of dyed
red hair he's sporting. All of which is pretty much perfect to play
Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe's treatment of Bernard
Shaw's play in which Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle is transformed
into a cut-class society belle by the Frankenstein-like Higgins, who
gives her elocution lessons.
Not that Meine faire Dame – ein Sprachlabor (My Fair Lady – a language
laboratory), Swiss director Christoph Marthaler's bi-lingual creation
for Theatre Basel that opens at Edinburgh International festival this
week can be called a conventional version of either play. Rather,
Marthaler sets out his store in a 1970s style language lab, in which
foreign exchange students learn English from an eccentric professor,
played by Valentine.
As the professor attempts to discover who left the bouquet of flowers
on his desk, his plight is accompanied by music, not just from My Fair
Lady, but everything from Weber, Wagner, Bryan Adams and George Michael
besides. In looks alone, Marthaler's comic romp resembles the cast of
unreconstructed 1970s language school based sit-com Mind Your Language
doing a pastiche of a Crackerjack Christmas special in a group therapy
session.
“We've always wanted to do a production of My Fair Lady,” Valentine
says of his shared ambition with Marthaler, who he has collaborated
with on and off for the best part of four decades. We've been talking
about this for years, and Christoph was asked to do a show, but the
theatre in Basel was actually doing a full scale production of the
musical. In German, obviously, and with the songs in German too, I
think, so he thought it would be a good idea to translate it
approximately into German, and call it Meine faire Dame. Fair in German
is used, but it doesn't mean fair in the sense of good looking. It mean
fair in the sense of just, so the production is very much only using My
Fair Lady as a launching pad.”
Words mean a lot to Valentine. This is apparent from the way he
enunciates every syllable of his collaborators' names with all the
perfectly posed inflections acquired from their place of origin. In
this sense, Valentine has more in common with Henry Higgins than he
might care to admit.
“I used to be a language teacher before I became an actor,” he says,
“and also when I was a child in Dundee I was sent to elocution lessons,
so I've always, from about the age of five, been very aware of
language. Also, being brought up in Scotland in the working class that
wanted to get on, in the education system we had back in the fifties,
you were discouraged from speaking in ordinary Scots, and certainly in
the Dundee dialect. You were constantly corrected by every walking
authority that thought it was in your interest that you be
approximatising yourself to BBC standard English.
“That was just a far off ideal, but going to an elocution teacher was
part of the process for certain people. It was beginning to go out of
fashion in those days, but there were still lots of kids who did it,
and that was got me interested in the theatre as well. But basically it
taught me to look objectively on language as a means of communication,
and it taught me also that the English language was something that has
been appropriated by a certain group of people in British society for
their own ends, to make sure they retained the hegemony. So you had to
buy into the right to speak English, because Scotland's been used and
exploited by the English to do their hard work for them for hundreds of
years. From the start of the Union onwards, everyone was desperate to
get down to London and learn how to speak proper English. In James
Boswell's time they were up to that as well. So there was this
elocution tradition, to which I owe a lot, but it was also very much a
system to keep people down. That's what Pygmalion and My Fair Lady are
all about, this pretentious, pompous t*** presuming to know how you're
supposed to speak, but that's what British society's always been about
as well.”
Valentine first went onstage in Dundee aged six in a church hall next
to where Dundee Rep theatre now stands. This was at the behest of his
elocution teacher, who had a studio on Tay Square, and hired the church
hall to put on a show with her students every year. For Valentine, it
was a life-changing experience.
“I wasn't good or precocious in any kind of way, but there was
something about it that I found fascinating, the sort of terror and
thrill, the stage fright, all of that.”
It was learning foreign languages, however, that Valentine saw as a
potential passport out of Dundee. By the time he arrived at secondary
school, he was desperate to learn French, then later studied German and
Latin.
“It was like going into a new world to get out of this musty
atmosphere,” he says. “Looking back, I didn't think that at the time,
but that must have been what it was. It was like opening a skylight and
flying out into the blue, just the possibility of communicating in and
reading in another language.”
Valentine went to university in Aberdeen, and met Marthaler while
spending a year in Switzerland after teaching in Aberdeen for four
years. Marthaler was working as a musician, and the pair kept in touch.
After five years as a language teacher, Valentine decided to take his
interest in theatre beyond an amateur level, and he studied at the
Jacques Lecog school in France. After working in Paris for two years,
Valentine moved back to Britain, where he met director Deborah Warner,
and joined KICK, the theatre company she founded in 1980 for young
amateur actors.
Back in Scotland, Valentine worked with Dundee Rep, the Royal Lyceum in
Edinburgh and Communicado, with whom he appeared in Blood Wedding.
Valentine never embraced the rep system.
“It didn't interest me,” he says. “There wasn't really anything going
on apart from one or two dance companies and small companies like
Communicado.
Valentine was a permanent member of the Schauspielhaus in Zurich for
four years, but “I didn't like being a permanent member of anything.”
After eight years living in Paris, Valentine has just moved back to
Edinburgh. Whether this means we'll be seeing more of him on Scottish
stages remains to be seen. Either way, Valentine remains as
single-minded as ever.
“I don't really go in for roles,” he says. “I'm more interested in
creating something new using material which is in me.”
Meine faire Dame – ein Sprachlabor, EIF, Lowland Hall, Royal Highland
Centre, August 14th-15th and Aug 18-19th, 7.30pm; Aug 17th, 2pm
www.eif.co.uk
The Herald, August 14th 2012
ends
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