French theatre director Jean-Luc Choplin decided to bring My Fair Lady to the Paris stage, he was faced with a linguistic conundrum, reports The Guardian.
"How do you translate 'the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain'?" he said. "I mean, you can come up with something in French but it doesn't have the same clarity or sonority.
"It's not bad, it's just not the same thing. And it's such an important part of the play."
Rather than a Gallic version of Professor Higgins' famous phonetics course, which included the equally untranslatable: "In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen", Choplin made a high-risk decision to stage My Fair Lady in the original English.
The risk paid off, My Fair Lady crossed the cultural divide and the theatre's 27-show run in 2010 was a sellout.
Now Choplin is having another go at the classic musical, again in English with French subtitles. "It works because people know the original musical, which was followed by the film with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn and it's a great family classic so it's wonderful for Christmas," he said, sitting in the grand meeting room at the Châtelet Theatre in central Paris."Everybody loves a good fairy story; the princess, or in this case the flower seller who goes on to become a real lady. But there's much more to the story than that."
"My Fair Lady is a charming, seductive work. It is a much more serious than it seems. There are many levels of complexity and the story is universal. In it we see the class structure in that era in England and how language really is an obstacle to social access. It's also about change in England that at the time was become more industrial and opening out to the world.
"Of course it's not entirely saccharine and magic and this production is certainly not a little light music. We have an exceptional cast and a 40-strong orchestra in the pit so we have opera-like quality. Audiences aren't stupid, they know when something is artistically good … and when it is not."
Read more of this report from The Guardian.