Theatre · A way to begin
Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw · 1912
Synopsis
At Covent Garden, on a rainy evening, the phonetician Henry Higgins boasts that he can pass off Eliza Doolittle, a flower seller with a London street accent, as a duchess. Colonel Pickering takes up the bet: if Higgins succeeds within six months, at an ambassador's garden party, he will pay the costs. Eliza moves into the professor's house and submits to a gruelling apprenticeship in language and manners, in which class distinctions are at play.
Context
The play was premiered in German at the Hofburgtheater in Vienna on 16 October 1913, then in English in London, at His Majesty's Theatre, on 11 April 1914, with Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza. The actor who plays Higgins changes the ending without warning the author; Shaw replied in 1916 with an afterword explaining why his two protagonists cannot marry, and he still refused in 1938 to unite them. The film adaptation of that year won him the Oscar for screenplay.
Who it is for
A play in five acts, quick to read, translated into French by Augustin and Henriette Hamon as early as 1924, then by Michel Habart.
Prizes and reception
Adapted for the screen in 1938, then turned on Broadway in 1956 into the musical My Fair Lady, itself filmed in 1964.
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