Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) by McHugh, Dominic (best ereader for pc .TXT) 📗

In 1884 Shaw joined the Fabian Society, which championed social reform through debate. Here he was in his element, and in the same year decided to become a playwright. His first stage work, Widowers’ Houses, was eventually completed and performed in 1892. Its subject matter hints that Shaw started as he meant to go on: a young couple, Harry and Blanche, are thwarted in their love by Harry’s disgust at the exploitative behavior of Blanche’s father, a slum landlord. The following year, Shaw wrote Mrs. Warren’s Profession, a controversial play in which he suggests that prostitution is “an economic rather than moral problem, a position that caused the play to be banned from public stages in Britain for over twenty-five years.”2 In both these works, the oppressed and the poor are treated with sympathy, and Shaw’s defense of women’s rights in Mrs. Warren is particularly indicative of his stance on sexual equality. Poverty was also a theme in Major Barbara (1905), in which he described it as “the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes.” Another important factor is the style of these plays, which mix humor and lightness with a seriousness of purpose.

Both this technical approach and these themes recur in Pygmalion, which Shaw started to write in March 1912. It took three months to complete, but it is documented that the basic premise of the play was in his mind from 1897.3 All along, Shaw envisaged using his muse, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, in the role of Eliza Doolittle, but she took quite some convincing since, as Shaw himself said, she had “never appeared in a low life part.” The play received its premiere, in German, in Vienna in 1913, and was also performed in Berlin later that year, so it was not until April 1914 that it received its English-language premiere at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. (Several of Shaw’s previous works had also been given their first performances abroad, since the playwright abhorred the tastes of London’s critics and “knew [his plays] would be received more sympathetically by theatre managers and critics” in other countries.)4 Unfortunately, the rehearsal period was overshadowed by a three-way tension between Shaw, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the actor-manager who ran Her Majesty’s Theatre and had been hired to play Higgins after much debate.5 It did not augur well for the work, which had long been one of Shaw’s pet projects.

Pygmalion’s first-night reviews were sidetracked by Eliza’s line “Not bloody likely” from act 3.6 The word “bloody” had rarely been used onstage before and was controversial. This inevitably became the focus of the reviews, and Shaw was unhappy that it “had become a major distraction from the more serious elements of the play.”7 The first performance was also spoiled for Shaw by Tree’s divergence from the intended ending of the play. Shaw had underlined to the actors that Eliza and Higgins do not finish up together, and the original text of the scene makes this clear, too. Eliza bids a final farewell to the Professor, but quite casually he asks her to buy him a ham, some cheese, a pair of gloves, and a new tie. She retorts, “Buy them yourself.” Mrs. Higgins (who is present in the final scene, which takes place at her house in the play, rather than Higgins’s house as in My Fair Lady) offers to buy the tie and gloves in her place, but Higgins ends with: “Oh don’t bother. She’ll buy’em all right enough.”8 However, Shaw wrote to his wife that Tree depicted Higgins “shoving his mother rudely out of his way and wooing Eliza with appeals to buy a ham for his lonely home like a bereaved Romeo.”9 Later in the run, this had developed further, with the actor throwing flowers to Eliza as she left the stage at the end.10

PYGMALION: CLARIFYING THE TEXT

Shaw’s reaction to this liberal treatment of his script was to amend it. To the end of the 1916 edition of the play he added a “Sequel,” in which he explained in prose what he intended by the final scene. Pygmalion is subtitled “A Romance,” and Shaw makes it clear in the sequel that this description refers not to a union between Higgins and Eliza but to the “transfiguration” of its heroine, a process the writer describes as “exceedingly improbable.”11 In other words, Eliza’s unlikely rise through the social ranks is the romantic element of the plot, rather than romance itself. Shaw also relates how Eliza and Freddy get married, briefly live with Higgins and Pickering, and later set up their own florist shop. Relations between the four remain positive, and Shaw says that Eliza is “immensely interested” in Higgins, and even has “secret mischievous moments” in which she wishes she could “just drag him off his pedestal and see him making love like any common man.”

But, he continues firmly, “when it comes to … the life that she really leads as distinguished from the life of dreams and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel; and she does not like Higgins.”12 Eliza’s decision to choose Freddy over Higgins is “well-considered,” says the playwright, because she knows that the Professor will always prefer his mother, Milton, and the Universal Alphabet to herself. Since she is young and gifted, she has options. “Will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers?” asks Shaw, and goes on to answer that she marries Freddy.13 He adds that her “instinct tells her not to marry Higgins” but “does not tell her to give him up,” and underlines that he will remain “one of the strongest personal interests in her life.”14

Shaw frequently tried to convince performers and audiences of his point of view, but it was often in vain. For a 1920 production at the Aldwych Theatre, he changed the text of the final scene by having Higgins return to the front of