Lightweight entertainment? Not bloody likely!

Peter Hall's Revival of Bernard Shaw’s Comic Classic is a Triumph

“The finest Shaw in years.” Daily Telegraph

Exclusive Asian Premiere

Most people know the musical adaptation of Pygmalion: My Fair Lady; many sing along to the songs and most love the final scene, a happy ending of love and marriage. An ending, incidentally, that George Bernard Shaw derided as “damnable”. Shaw deliberately subverted Ovid's Metamorphoses when he wrote Pygmalion. In his play, the boy doesn't get the girl. Sir Peter Hall's “scintillating revival of Shaw's most famous comedy” (The Guardian) returns to the original text resulting in a wry comedy about class, language and emotion.

Arrogant, pompous and truculent Henry Higgins bets that he can transform guttersnipe Eliza from a Cockney flower-seller into a posh lady. She is eager for elocution lessons and he takes on the task with diabolical joy. He attempts to change Eliza's entire personality, oblivious to the consequences for her. While not overtly political, Shaw's play reflects his sympathy for the suffragette movement and has a distinct feminist bent. Rather than marry his transformation, as did Ovid's Pygmalion, Higgins is left forlorn as Eliza's metamorphosis gives her unexpected independence and strength of character, allowing her to leave him.

Pygmalion delighted both audiences and critics when it opened in Bath in 2007. This superb production is a triumph for Hall. Shaw had become unfashionable ─ his plays considered only lightweight entertainment. Hall's production rediscovers Shaw as a writer who merged the comic and the serious, writing about character and human destiny. Described as “astonishingly fresh and funny” (Sunday Times), Hall's rendition exposes the danger of being transformed into someone else's toy.

Eliza's scandalous exit line, “Walk! Not bloody likely”, continues to cause laughter; it is a comedy after all. But it is the seriousness of the play that remains powerful and contemporary.

Performed in English with Chinese surtitles

The Hong Kong cast may be different from the original cast featured on this website.

Production photos by Nobby Clark

Photos on this website feature the original cast.

Humour and Humanity

Bernard Shaw’s brilliant mixture of the comic and the serious in Pygmalion

by Peter Hall

Comedy is tragedy averted; tragedy is often comedy suppressed. Nothing is more powerful for a dramatist than a penetrating sense of the ridiculous. This Shaw had in abundance. Comedy is his way of being serious.

“I am staggered by our current indifference to Shaw,” wrote drama critic Michael Billington in 2005. However, this indifference is comparatively recent. Until some years ago there were usually one or two Shaw productions available to the theatre-going public. Then, Shaw became unfashionable – perhaps paradoxically because his plays were becoming too well-known.

The accepted cliché was that his talent was for lightweight entertainments, which simply manipulated his characters as mouthpieces for Shavian opinions. Perhaps, though, these productions may have presented a rather different Shaw from the one that is being rediscovered. It is now clear that Shaw’s plays are about people, not puppets – and none more so than Pygmalion. After Mrs Warren’s Profession had been banned in 1893, Shaw resolved to write no more plays about social issues; he would concentrate instead on ‘plays of life, character and human destiny’. In Pygmalion he achieved a brilliant synthesis of the comic and the serious.

Of its comedic qualities, there can be no doubt; the first three acts culminate in the famous scene in which Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower seller whom Professor Higgins has undertaken to transform by phonetic tuition into an impeccably spoken lady, causes a social sensation with her notorious exit line: “Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi.” The furore caused by that ‘bloody’ at the first London performance in 1914 has continued to distract attention from what Shaw achieved in the two acts that follow. There is still laughter, but the audience is invited to witness some complex psychological analysis.

It brings the play closer to Strindberg and Ibsen, dramatists whom Shaw greatly admired and emulated. He said that we watch Ibsen’s The Wild Duck “with horror and pity at a profound tragedy, shaking with laughter all the time at an irresistible comedy”. This combination of contrasting extremes is particularly relevant to Pygmalion, and in performance comedy and tragedy are pushed as far as they will go.

So what does the seriousness of Pygmalion consist of? What is it about? Not, certainly, about phonetics, despite Shaw’s interest in the subject. Eliza asks Higgins to give her elocution lessons. If the play were simply about that, it would be irretrievably dated in our anti-verbal 21st century, where politicians want to be seen on television chatting away like any other man in the street. The play is about something much tougher (and paradoxically more contemporary): Higgins sets out to change someone’s personality.

From the start their aims diverge. She simply wants to be taught to speak correctly so that she may get a job in a florist’s shop rather than having to sell flowers in the street (with the inevitable risk that she will be arrested for soliciting). He, on the other hand, wants to create a “Duchess Eliza”: “My masterpiece”, as he calls her at the end. The last two acts develop this tension and the play ends in heartbreak.

What Higgins takes no account of is that his creation might have feelings of her own, and that in changing her he might have left her worse off than before. She herself has no illusions about this: “I didn’t sell myself. Now you’ve made a lady of me, I’m not fit to sell anything else…why did you take my independence from me?” But as she comes to realize, by teaching her phonetics Higgins has actually increased her potential for independence: “I’ll advertise it in the papers that your Duchess is only a flower girl that you taught, and that she’ll teach anybody to be a Duchess just the same in six months for a thousand guineas.” The pupil has outdone the master.

In the film version, and in the musical masterpiece My Fair Lady, the two characters come together in a sentimental conclusion: the end is romance. Shaw was vehemently opposed to this, and when the seriousness of their relationship is uncovered in the last two acts, it seems amazing that anyone would think that they could end up together.

When Higgins says he will miss Eliza, or when she says, “We were pleasant together, and I came to care for you, not to want you to make love to me, but more friendly like”, Shaw is clearly leading his audience to expect a conventional romantic ending. And he does that in order to deprive them of it. What emerges most strongly from the final scene is Eliza’s sheer independence. She is arguably stronger than Higgins.

Throughout his life Shaw pursued laughter as a way of being taken seriously. So in Act Two, just when the political temperature of the play is dropping, he produces a new character, Eliza’s father, the dustman Alfred Doolittle. With his marvellous exposition of what it is to be one of the “undeserving poor”, Doolittle might have been simply a virtuoso comic turn; in fact, with his verbal dexterity, he has more than a little in common with Professor Higgins. When Higgins asks if Doolittle is “an honest man or a rogue”, he disarmingly replies, “a little of both, Henry, like the rest of us. A little of both.” There speaks unaccommodated man, not merely a music-hall turn.

Peter Hall, director of Pygmalion.