Pygmalion is
a 1912 play by George Bernard Shaw.
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. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class
system of the day and a commentary on women's independence.
In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion was
the creator of a statue which came to life and was a popular subject for Victorian
era English playwrights,
including one of Shaw's influences, W. S.
Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story in 1871, called Pygmalion and Galatea. Shaw also would
have been familiar with the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed.
Shaw's play has been adapted numerous times, most notably as the musical my fair lady and the film of that name
I WILL BE LETTING YOU KNOW HOW THE STORY REALLY IS ACT PER ACT ...........................
Act One
Portico of Saint Paul's Church (not Wren's Cathedral but Inigo Jones Church in Covent Garden vegetable market)' - 11.15p.m. A group of people are sheltering from the rain. Amongst them are the Eynsford-Hills, superficial social climbers eking out a living in "genteel poverty", consisting initially of Mrs. Eynsford-Hill and her daughter Clara. Clara's brother Freddy enters having earlier been dispatched to secure them a cab (which they can all afford), but being rather timid and faint-hearted he has failed to do so. As he goes off once again to find a cab, he bumps into a flower girl, Eliza. Her flowers drop into the mud of Covent Garden, the flowers she needs to survive in her poverty-stricken world. Shortly they are joined by a gentleman, Colonel Pickering. While Eliza tries to sell flowers to the Colonel, a bystander informs her that a man is writing down everything she says. The man is Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics. Eliza worries that Higgins is a police officer and will not calm down until Higgins introduces himself. It soon becomes apparent that he and Colonel Pickering have a shared interest in phonetics; indeed, Pickering has come from India to meet Higgins, and Higgins was planning to go to India to meet Pickering. Higgins tells Pickering that he could pass off the flower girl as a duchess merely by teaching her to speak properly. These words of bravado spark an interest in Eliza, who would love to make changes in her life and become more mannerly, even though, to her, it only means working in a flower shop. At the end of the act, Freddy returns after finding a taxi, only to find that his mother and sister have gone and left him with the cab. The streetwise Eliza takes the cab from him, using the money that Higgins tossed to her, leaving him on his own.
Whole play in below link- Thank me later...
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. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class
system of the day and a commentary on women's independence.
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