This weekend for school I finished reading PYGMALION by Bernard Shaw. For those of you wondering why I have used a quote from MY FAIR LADY as my title, well...it's the same thing. MY FAIR LADY is PYGMALION in musical form.
I find myself yet again struggling to critique PYGMALION as it is a very well known and highly appraised play. There are some things I may be able to say, though. For the audience watching the play, the experience would have been much different than actually reading the script. I don't know how they did it onstage when it was originally performed, but there are actually huge gaps of time in the script where Shaw has just written in what has been happening. They might have narrated this to the audience, which I hope they did because otherwise the audience missed huge pieces of the storyline. Honestly, I was reading it and wondering why on earth Shaw didn't just write those bits into the play rather than describing it to you; the pieces he didn't include seemed to have been included in MY FAIR LADY, by the way. (Like "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain" was never in the original BECAUSE in the original, Shaw simply describes one lesson that Eliza Doolittle has been having and then jumps ahead five months. He literally goes straight from Higgins agreeing to tutor Eliza to the night that Eliza emerges a "duchess".)
Anyways, there was my rant. As for a description, the play PYGMALION is a rendition of the original story of Pigmalion, about a sculptor who creates his ideal woman out of marble, makes out with her a lot, prays to the goddess Venus for his love to come to him in the likeness of the statue and then the statue comes to life. In Bernard Shaw's PYGMALION, it is much the same as MY FAIR LADY; Henry Higgins is a speach therapist working with Colonel Pickering and they bet each other that they can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower-seller who dreams of opening a flower shop but doesn't speak nicely enough to do it, into a "duchess" and pass her off as such. In the end, they succeed. That's pretty much all the play shows you, as well as a fight at the end between Eliza and Higgins. The reader can guess that Higgins has feelings for Eliza, though her feelings aren't quite clear (you could speculate that she likes both Higgins and Pickering, as well as Freddy whom she marries). In the end, nothing happens between them unlike in MY FAIR LADY.
Ultimately, it was quite fun to read the spelled-out cockney and the storyline was fairly entertaining even if there were huge lapses in time. It was definitely worth the read, and I finished it in two hours. Maybe you should pick it up?
Hopefully I'll be reading something more interesting for you soon.
-Victoria
Source for cover image: http://www.google.ca/imgres?hl=en&biw=1366&bih=643&tbm=isch&tbnid=OKs3KWnJa30MNM:&imgrefurl=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0030637/&docid=WWEB4HKPbUlGRM&imgurl=http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BODI4MDE4MzYzNl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDExMTgxMQ%2540%2540._V1._SY317_CR6,0,214,317_.jpg&w=214&h=317&ei=oiBzUO-QM_SH0QHcwIGAAg&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=414&vpy=152&dur=4680&hovh=253&hovw=171&tx=100&ty=110&sig=101342462150338071778&page=1&tbnh=131&tbnw=110&start=0&ndsp=27&ved=1t:429,r:2,s:0,i:140
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