Henry Higgins replaced by £6.99 voice-coaching app in modernised My Fair Lady

THE Fabricated Players have replaced Professor Henry Higgins with a £6.99-a-month voice-coaching app in their contemporary production of My Fair Lady.

Director Sandra said the change was necessary because modern audiences would struggle to believe Eliza Doolittle needed to move into a strange man’s house for six months simply to change how she pronounced vowels.

She said: “We looked at the original story and thought: surely there’s an app for this now.

“There was.”

In the new production, Eliza downloads SpeakBetter Premium after seeing an advert offering to transform her accent with just ten minutes of daily practice.

Higgins has therefore been removed entirely.

His role is performed by a smartphone mounted on a music stand.

The app begins by asking Eliza what she hopes to achieve.

She selects:

✓ Speak with confidence

✓ Improve pronunciation

✓ Pass as member of Edwardian upper classes

The third option requires Premium Plus.

Colonel Pickering remains in the production but now spends most of his time watching Eliza complete exercises and saying the technology is remarkable.

The famous pronunciation lesson has also been updated.

Instead of Higgins repeatedly instructing Eliza that “the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain”, her phone plays the sentence once before displaying:

Great job! Your pronunciation score is 73%.

Eliza improves rapidly.

Within three weeks she can pass convincingly at an embassy ball without enduring months of psychological abuse from an eccentric phonetics professor.

Sandra said: “It’s actually made Higgins look incredibly inefficient.

“He devoted his entire life to something Duolingo could probably sort out on a bus journey.”

The production does encounter difficulties when Eliza reaches her transformation scene and the app announces that her seven-day free trial has ended.

Her improved vowels are immediately locked behind a paywall.

She is offered three options:

£6.99 monthly

£59.99 annually

CONTINUE WITH COCKNEY

Eliza chooses monthly.

The society originally planned to have her return to Higgins at the end, before remembering he no longer exists.

Instead, she cancels her subscription.

The app asks her to rate her experience.

She gives it four stars.