Shabbat Reading: Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw

#whatireadovershabbat Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (premiered 1913; pub. 1916; Penguin, 2003)

My Fair Lady (1964) is justly recognized as a peerless cinematic delight. Regularly topping lists of greatest movie musicals, best performances, and fan favorites, the movie combines extraordinary talent (Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison) with incredible numbers (“I’m An Ordinary Man,” “Get Me To The Church On Time”) and a fast-moving, hilarious plot. It has, in short, everything going for it.

The latter quality, the ingenious plot, is due to the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (or as he preferred, Bernard Shaw). Shaw’s Pygmalion, the source for My Fair Lady, brought down the house in 1914, when it premiered at His Majesty’s Theater in the West End. The play ran for 118 performances.

You can understand why theater-goers flocked to the play. Two speech scientists—phoneticians, Shaw calls them—make a bet that they can turn a poor flower girl into a lady simply by teaching her to speak proper English. Hijinks ensue as Eliza Doolittle outperforms all expectations, ascending the ranks of genteel society. Best of all, threading through scene after scene of hilarious irony and misunderstanding, a love story develops between Henry Higgins, hard-nosed scientist and avowed man-child, and the inimitable Eliza, experimental subject and linguistic savant.

Yet to the fans’ horror, Shaw didn’t offer a vision of happily ever after. Henry and Eliza are too much at loggerheads by play’s end to have a future together. Eliza even vows, in the heat of an argument, to marry the equally poor but genteelly middle-class Freddy Eynsford-Hill, who’s fallen in love with her, though he doesn’t get enough stage time to convince anyone in the audience that he’s the one. Fandom being what it has always been, Shaw was harangued to write a sequel where the hoped-for pairing comes off successfully...

To read the rest, check out my Substack, Well-Read (or Trying)