It's a My Fair Lady for the 21st century in Southampton

“If you try to make any kind of apology for him, it just wouldn't land,” says Michael D Xavier who is playing him in the production of My Fair Lady which plays Southampton’s Mayflower Theatre from January 12-29. “In 2022 we have to see how ridiculous he is and how ridiculous his opinions are of women and of other people. He's just so upset about the way some people can't speak English properly. I think in our modern world we would say that he would be slightly somewhere on the spectrum but he just can't bear certain sounds that people make. It bugs him so much to hear the sound of Eliza’s voice and the sound of the people that he meets in Covent Garden. But he can't avoid it because he's just so fascinated and it's that fascination that bothers him so much. He just has this great sensitivity to the sounds that people make.”

The best you can say for him is that he is completely honest: “There's just no filter. He tells it how it is. There is a line towards the end of the show where Eliza says Colonel Pickering treats a flower girl as if she were duchess. Higgins says that he would treat a duchess as if she were a flower girl. He's just trying to make the point that every human being shouldn’t be treated differently according to their class. So maybe his virtue is his honesty, the fact that he doesn't lie about anything. He is cerebrally advanced but emotionally inept. He just doesn't understand human emotion.”

Michael, who played Freddie in the show 20 years ago and believes he is the only performer to have gone on to play Higgins, is delighted by the response that the touring production is getting. He believes there is equal fascination among audiences for Higgins and for Eliza, the victim of his social experiment: “I think everyone is fascinated by the rags to riches story. It is that idea that you can become someone else overnight and when you think about it, The X Factor was born out of that, that rags to riches dream that people have that everything can change for them, that they can move on from their humdrum life into something remarkable. Higgins isn't thinking about an overnight change but it's a similar kind of thing. He just wants to change the way she speaks. But the great thing about the way that this production is directed is that it really shows the strength of the women, particularly Eliza but also my mother who stands by her. And there is a difference from the film with the ending that we've got which is much more in line with what George Bernard Shaw wanted.”

The show has been on the road for a while now and Michael is delighted that things are seeming almost back to normal: “We have just done the Edinburgh Playhouse, and we didn't fill the place because it is so huge but we had 2,400 people in Edinburgh for a Saturday matinee and that's the biggest audience we've had since London.

"It's just really lovely to be going back almost to the old days of full houses and people lapping it up and cheering wildly so it does feel that we're getting back to normal in that respect but there is still perhaps a slight reticence, if that is not too hard a word. People are concerned about the cost of living crisis now.”