Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a comment on women's independence, packaged as a romantic comedy.
Who DOESN'T love this story?? It's been a long time since I've seen My Fair Lady but now I'm itching to rent it.
Pygmalion is just a fantastic play. There's a quote on the back cover of the copy I got from the library that really sums it up for me:
[George Bernard Shaw is] The most influential writer of his age...His plays can scarcely prove other than lastingly delightful since they are the product of vigorous intelligence joined to inexhaustible comic invention.
-J.I.M. Stewart in the Oxford History of English Literature
Exactly. It's witty and funny and the characters are so likeable and the whole thing is generally delightful. And I can't read it without singing, "Just you wait, Henry Higgins, just you wait!" which just improves the experience. This one goes on my hypothetical favorites list.
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