Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion Bernard Shaw

In 1912 Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw completed his new five-act comedy Pygmalion, introducing theatre-goers to Eliza Doolittle, Professor Henry Higgins, Colonel Pickering and the boisterous street life of London's Covent Garden. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. He bets his friend he can transform Eliza's speech, manners, dress and ideas. In six months she will pass as a duchess. Higgins succeeds. Eliza is transformed into elegance. But, to Higgins' frustration, plucky Eliza won't be manipulated by him and she steals the show... The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence. The play opened in the West End, at His Majesty's Theatre Haymarket, on 11 April 1914. It rapidly became a theatrical tour de force. Audiences were delighted. Pygmalion has been imitated ever since, including a 1938 film version with Leslie Howard, the 1956 Broadway musical My Fair Lady and 1964 Hollywood film, starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison.