listening

This week we watched in a lecture the play "Pygmalion" by George Bernard Shaw and so impressed am I by it that I figured out I just have to write something about it here and now.

The play is based on a classical myth which can be found in Ovid's "Metamorphoses". It is about the sculptor Pygmalion who carved a woman out of ivory. Although he is not interested in women, his statute is so real-to-life that he falls head over heals in love with it. The Godess Venus sees his infatuation and finally brings the statue, Galatea, to life and the two marry an have a son.

George B. Shaw's "Pygmalion", on the other hand, talks about the complexity of human relationships in a social world. In a nutshell, the play is about the truculent phonetics professor Henry Higgins who tutors the very Cockney Elizabeth Doolittle, the focal figure in the play, in the fine-tuning of her speech and her manners.
Although Higgins at first sees this tutoring as a fun way of killing time, he realises soon enough that his work has far-reaching implications.

Much more prominent as the play is its Broadway adaption under the title "My Fair Lady" which many of you have probably had the pleasure to see. "My Fair Lady" is a 1956 Broadway musical production based on Shaw's play "Pygmalion" which was dubbed on of the most successful musicals in history.

My opinion:

I hold the film version to be very compelling in the depiction of the difference between social classes and in the portrayal of the sad truth that at the beginning of the 20th century a woman's faith was completely in men's hands.

Sources:
http://www.bartleby.com/138/
(about Shaw's play)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_%28mythology%29
(Pygmalion in mythology)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady
(about the musical "My Fair Lady")