Pygmalion

First off, I have to say, the entire time I was reading this play, all I could imagine and hear in my head was the movie/musical My Fair Lady. If you haven’t seen it, it’s pretty much the Pygmalion story in a musical form, with a slightly different story line, and I highly recommend it if you had problems with Eliza’s accent. At any rate, I had all of the songs from My Fair Lady stuck in my head for the past 3 days. But, as annoying as it was, knowing the storyline in advance did help me to understand what was happening in the play, especially with Eliza’s accent. The vocal link Mrs. Pierce gave us to listen too was also helpful in understanding some of the strong dialect.

Before class today I didn’t realize how the play Pygmalion was connected to the ancient Greek and Roman myth. The likeness of the two stories is not as strong as in other adaption’s, but it is still there. Most modern adaptions would probably keep Galatea as a statue and Pygmalion as a sculptor; with maybe some name variation and change of venue and language. But the way Shaw uses the ancient story to adapt it to modern day is amazing. Thinking that Higgins was just using Eliza to sculpt a perfect member of society by his standards was pretty twisted. When comparing the play to My Fair Lady it’s interesting to see the difference in characters but the almost complete similarity in storyline. When watching My Fair Lady, you do not really get a sense of Higgins being a creepy old guy out to use Eliza for his own entertainment. While in the play, Pygmalion that is how I read his character.

Over the past few classes when we’ve focused on comparing the play with its film adaption, I’ve become more in tune with spotting the small differences between the two. So when I read Shaw’s play, I saw able to quickly compare our modern day musical adaption in my head and see how the directors of both may have changed some things around to use to their advantage. The moral story that each of the adaption’s tell, I think, is still similar. In each, once Higgins turns Eliza into a “sophisticated lady,” there is nowhere for her to go, physically and socially. She’s stuck between two classes that are both not going to easily except her.