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Once Again Sadaf Karim and her team of staff members and students at The French School of Bahrain gave us a lovely evening’s entertainment in their own inimitable style.
Unlike previous years, the majority of this year’s production was in the French language with a little English thrown in the mix for good measure.
It was sad that there were so many empty seats for this delightful performance. With the school hosting more than 600 students I would have thought that many more families would have turned up to support the upper school pupils. They all missed a treat.
What Sadaf did was to take the concept of My Fair Lady and rework the formula so that Eliza Doolittle was found working the streets of Paris as a flower seller and turned into a true Parisian Princess by Professor Henry Higgins.
It speaks volumes to the work that the students and Sadaf had put into the production that my severely-challenged schoolgirl French, barely utilised for the past 50+ years, was enough for me to follow the nuances of the production.
The students were plainly more comfortable talking in French … indeed why wouldn’t they be!
A fair bit sailed right past me as it was so fast, but I like to think that I kept up with the story and the songs that lined each scene were absolutely delightful. Sung in French and English, the numbers were very professionally delivered.
The principal actors were wonderful, bringing vitality to their performances, but special praise has to go to Mohamed Mohamed as Frederic.
He had the hardest part, bringing the comedy element into the limelight and he did it brilliantly. After an initial display of nerves during his first two or three lines, he took control of the stage and the audience.
There is a misconception that the comedic element is the easiest part of a play to perform. Not so, getting it just right is very hard … and he did.
Cassanadra Nasr and Gaelle Honein (playing the part of Eliza) were lovely and Hasan Faouaz (Henry Higgins) and Yvan Haiby (Colonel Pickering) had obviously researched their parts by careful inspection of adult behaviour.
Congratulations also to the choir, all 60 of them. They and the case had the audience eating out of their hands. As I said at the start, a lovely evening’s entertainment.
