IN an age when our three most successful actors are all from Eton or Harrow, does “class” still hold sway in Britain and does an accent still define us?

Sam Pritchard’s new vision of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion thrusts that question into the field of video screens, digital sampling, state-of-the art sound machines and multiracial Britain, while never divorcing itself from Shaw’s Edwardian 1913 world either.

In this touring co-production from partners West Yorkshire Playhouse, in Leeds, Headlong, in London, and Nuffield Theatres, in Southampton, we are immediately confronted by the contrast between what we see and what we hear, to emphasise how we make value judgements initially on voice.

Pritchard has all his cast awkwardly lip-synching lines, the voices pre-recorded and not their own, clashing with attire, the intonation sometimes modern, other times from an earlier Pygmalion age. This is disorientating, alienating, a feeling enhanced by the initial set being the back of a (sound) studio. Nothing is real, as John Lennon once put it in Strawberry Fields.

Given that theatre is artifice, and that a play is derived from the act of playing, Pritchard absolutely embraces the possibilities of manipulation, of deception, of transformation, with bravura humour and audacious visual wit, aided by Alex Lowde’s design. Yet it can’t all be art and artifice, as represented by Alex Beckett’s on-trend bleach-haired, insufferably smug, often rude, unfeeling, emotionally anorexic Professor Henry Higgins.

There has to be heart and depth rather than mere surface, as expressed in empathy for Bradford actress Natalie Gavin’s flower seller Eliza Doolittle, here a Yorkshire girl in London (but still with an East End father in Ian Burfield’s Alfred Doolittle), as she faces losing as much as she may gain in swapping flat West Riding vowels for poise and a mellifluous metropolitan RP.

Indeed, if anything, Pritchard and Gavin’s damaged Eliza have the debit account outstripping any upward mobility; the suggestion being that for all the growing middle class in Britain, the extremes of the social divide are wider than ever, and we are still riven by class distinctions.

The director is fearless in bringing his own extras to the Shaw show, not least a lovely moment when Eliza corrects Higgins on his pronunciation of Keighley, and later he has fun upgrading the profanities at the Mrs Higgins’s party to the point of needing bleeping out. Having Higgins reveal the sampling skills of a DJ is his most out-there directorial decision, but then chasing extra comedy is always a risk, a move that can divide opinion.

In this instance, it is worth that risk because it is in keeping with the professor breaking with etiquette, when so palpably bored by convention and the niceties of polite society manners.

Ultimately, what lies beneath the surface wins out in Pritchard’s “Pygmalion-Land”, thanks to Gavin, but the surface sheen is memorable too.

Charles Hutchinson

* Pygmalion runs at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until tomorrow. Call (0113) 213 7700.