Character on the couch: Professor Henry Higgins
Each week we subject one of drama's great personalities to psychoanalysis. Today Professor Henry Higgins is played by Christopher Cazenove. The psychiatrist is Leo Benedictus.
Hello, Professor Higgins. How are you?
Moderately well. I've been running a teaching experiment with this flowergirl, Eliza Doolittle, who I grabbed out of the gutter. My friend Colonel Pickering bet me that I couldn't pass her off as a duchess at the embassy ball last night, but I did.
Well done. What has your relationship with this girl been like?
Oh she's a nightmare - like all women, really. All the women in my life have proved a disaster. Although, as women go, she's not unattractive.
Well, that's something.
Yes, but she's really pretty tiresome. Mind you, Pickering's paying for all the clothes and everything, which helps. A fellow's got to earn a living with all these servants who keep singing songs around me all the time.
Songs?
Yes, they're a terrible nuisance.They just keep entering my study and doing another chorus and then pissing off again. It's very confusing.
And do you ever feel the need to sing as well?
Well, I do burst into what some people would call song from time to time. It's as if there's an orchestra in my head, and if I do a bit of singing it goes away.
It seems to lighten my mood somewhat. I sometimes get upset because Eliza seems to be two different people. She looks different on different nights.
I see. A sort of hallucination. And are you going to miss Eliza when she's gone?
I will miss her a little because I've learned something from her idiotic notions, but I can do without anything and anybody. She'll probably go off and marry that dreadful Freddie - a complete wimp who she thinks loves her. I suggested that she could marry Pickering, but she pooh-poohed it. It's pathetic.
I detect something fatherly in the way you speak about her.
I don't want to analyse my feelings for her.
OK. Perhaps we can come to that in a later session. I'm afraid this one is over.
It's about time.
· My Fair Lady is at the Birmingham Hippodrome until December 3. Box office: 0870 730 1234. Then touring.