Pygmalion, A Play by George Bernard Shaw.
The good news for students of Pygmalion who might be struggling with the Cockney pronunciation is that George Bernard Shaw’s classic comedy is now available on audiobook. This means that the Pygmalion student can now benefit from listening to the play and reading the script at the same time.
This is a fully dramatized version which incorporates the entire Pygmalion script. The narration of the characters in the play, Professor Higgins, Colonel Pickering, Eliza Doolittle are performed by famous English actors including Michael Redgrave, Donald Pleasance and Lynn Redgrave.
Shaw’s play was written in 1913 and the first English production took place in London in 1914. It was regarded as one of the best British comedies of that era. The Pygmalion theme was transformed into a musical by Lerner and Loewe in the 1950′s and became a Broadway smash hit in 1956. The musical, which was renamed ‘My Fair Lady’, includes several memorable songs such as ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’, ‘On The Street Where You Live’, and ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed To Your Face’. The production won the prestigious Tony Award for Best Musical in 1956.
My Fair Lady has been translated into many languages including Czech, Danish, French, German, Polish, Spanish etc..
In 1964, Hollywood produced a film version of My Fair Lady starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. The film won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Musical Score.
The plot of Pygmalion revolves around a wager between two uppercrust Englishmen concerning the transformation of a cockney speaking flower girl into an upperclass English lady. Professor Higgins, a phonetics expert boasts to his colleague Colonel Pickering as follows: ‘You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party. I could even get her a place as lady’s maid or shop assistant, which requires better English.’
The ‘creature’ in question is Eliza Doolittle a flower girl who was brought up in the cockney speaking East London.
A quote from the audiobook publishers Harper Collins follows:
‘Following this public boast, Professor Henry Higgins accepts a challenge to teach the flower-seller Eliza Doolittle to speak standard English and launch her into polite society.
Through Higgins’s triumphant transformation of Eliza into a ‘lady’, and Eliza’s subsequent rebellion against Higgins’s attitudes and assumptions, Shaw’s provocative comedy explores questions of speech and class in England.’
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Thank You
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