Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

This little play took me all of ninety pages to read. It's only 94 pages long, including stage notes and that, so I must be losing my edge.

This play was adapted very slightly to create the screenplay for My Fair Lady, the film featuring the splendid Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. It has given me endless joy over the years.

To be honest I thought the play would be more different from the film. The main difference is that in the film the main characters are reunited, and in the play their separation is final.

What is it about? It's about the chains that money and class wrap around us. It's about the dignity and feeling that carries a person through life with their chin up. It's about panache.

I am reminded of another play that is infused with a similarly witty eloquence. Cyrano de Bergerac, my all-time favourite romantic hero, could be considered an anti-Higgins - or rather Higgins is the anti-Cyrano. Cyrano is the great poet and lover, treating even a common flower-girl (who is disguised in his play as an orange-seller) as though she were a duchess. Higgins is condescending and rude almost without exception, and I laugh at his surprise when his desires are met with condescension and scorn.

To be honest, there is much more of Higgins' heart than of Cyrano's in me. It makes me unhappy in a way. Wouldn't we all love to say these magnificent lines in honesty:

I carry my adornments on my soul.
I do not dress up like a popinjay;
But inwardly, I keep my daintiness.
I do not bear with me, by any chance,
An insult not yet washed away – a conscience
Yellow with unpurged bile – an honor frayed
To rags, a set of scruples.
I go caparisoned in gems unseen,
Trailing white plumes of freedom, garlanded
With my good name – no figure of a man,
But a soul clothed in shining armor, hung
With deeds for decorations, twirling – thus –
A bristling wit, and swinging at my side
Courage, and on the stones of this old town
Making the sharp truth ring, like golden spurs!

 Rather I find myself acting out the dreary Henry Higgins charade:

If you can't stand the coldness of my sort of life, and the strain of it, go back to the gutter. Work til you are more a brute than a human being; and then cuddle and squabble and drink til you fall asleep. Oh, it's a fine life, the life of the gutter. It's real: it's warm: it's violent: you can feel it through the thickest skin: you can taste it and smell it without any training or any work. Not like Science and Literature and Classical Music and Philosophy and Art. You find me cold, unfeeling, selfish, don't you? Very well: be off with you to the sort of people you like. Marry some sentimental hog or other with lots of money, and a thick pair of lips to kiss you with and a thick pair of boots to kick you with. If you can't appreciate what you've got, you'd better get what you can appreciate.

 Making someone writhe until they come around to do what you want them to has its own jolly merits, but I think on the whole I'd rather be Cyrano.

I'm sorry if that didn't really have much to do with the play. I love it dearly, and I grinned like a fool on the GO train while I read it. Higgins is a marvellous worm, really, and I am happy that Eliza storms off with her very own Christian de Neuvillette (a cute, empty-headed boytoy, just like in Cyrano).