Nearly three years ago, we began a group project to record a play over at Librivox.

Today, it’s finally completed and available for download here: Librivox Pygmalion. It is of course the play that gave rise to the musical My Fair Lady, and I play Prof Henry Higgins.

For nearly two years, half the files lay languishing on servers, before one of the excellent co-ordinators at LV made me sit down and record the missing Henry Higgins lines. It was a job I had been putting off for years, but when I finally sat down to do it it took less than an hour.

To make a play at Librivox, we sit separately in our offices and houses across the world, and record the lines of each character one at a time. Another volunteer takes the various sound files and edits them together. The background sounds are not perfectly the same, and you can tell that this is the process we’ve used, rather than an expensive studio process with all the actors in the same place. And yet the finished project is really listenable and enjoyable.