Pygmalion

When professor of phonetics Henry Higgins wages with Colonel Pickering that he could teach even a gutter-mouthed flower seller how to speak like a duchess, little does he expect that his social experiment will be riddled with difficulties, and that, behind her cockney parlance, the girl in question, Eliza Doolittle, has a mind, ideas and aspirations of her own. Things come to a crux when the creature starts to rebel against her creator – and the scene is set for a play that questions the class system, social appearances and the role of women in society.

Universally regarded as Shaw's most successful work for the stage, Pygmalion – here presented in its original 1916 version, with a wealth of extra material, including the author's subsequent revisions and additions to the text – has spawned a great number of screen adaptations, among them the famous 1956 Broadway musical My Fair Lady, and shows ancient myth's undiminishing ability to find new incarnations in modern life.

About the Author

The author of over fifty works for the stage – among them Pygmalion and Man and Superman – the Irish playwright and political writer George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was the leading dramatist of his generation and the recipient of the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature.