Pygmalion

Description

In the 19th century, Britain faced many challenges due to its class based society, with often nothing but people’s speech patterns being enough to keep them rooted in their own static area of society from which it was hard to escape.

In this famous George Bernard Shaw play, Henry Higgins, a renowned speech therapist and expert, meets Liza Doolittle, a lowerclass girl with one of the most distorted English accents he had ever heard. As part of a wager, Higgins challenges himself to teach Liza how to speak properly, and even integrate her into higher society without anyone being ableto tell that she’s actually a lowerclass individual.

While Higgins’ progress seems to be slow at first, Liza proves to be up to the challenge, although things quickly get complicated when the two main protagonists end up falling for each other, and their relationship becomes bitter sweet – the kind of love/hate relationship you’d rarely expect to work.

Pygmalion is considered to be one of Bernard Shaw’s most successful works, beautifully mixing comedy with romance, the possibility of overcoming one’s personal limitations, the complex facets of the British social norms and boundaries of the time, as well as the emphasis on artificiality when it comes to describing many of the ironic traits associated with the upper classes.

The title, however, leans more toward bringing the focus onto the romantic relationship between Higgins and Liza, hinting at Higgins’ predicament, with Pygmalion being a Greek artist who became infatuated with his own sculpture.

Many would likely be more acquainted with the movie version of Bernard Shaw’s remarkable work – My Fair Lady – which gained great recognition in the mid-1960s, having won multiple Academy awards.


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