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Having finished reading this play this morning after having started it last night, I shall begin with the personal, move on to the
geopolitical, and then finish with the literary. In order of importance I suppose.
When I was young my father travelled alot. A lot. Naturally, like any other child, I did not want to got to bed and found that getting
mom to agree to watch a movie was a particularly effective strategy toward this end. The longest movie in our VHS collection, that is,
longest which was itself not more boring than sleep, was My Fair Lady. And so I was first introduced to Shaw's tale in a
musical iteration. And I also fell in love with Audrey Hepburn's acting, despite (as I later learned) Marni Nixon having done all the
singing. Similarly, every old Rex Harrison film I stumble upon is a treat. Much later in life, when I was working on my third bachelor's
degree (in German), I often found myself in the classes of Robin Huff, whose love of the film periodically led him to burst into song in
the middle of class. Repetitions of a theme in the symphony of life I suppose.
The theme, though, is much older than I. Pygmalion, I was surprised to learn, was first performed in the fall of 1913 in Vienna. I
suppose it's only natural for the work to have been performed first in the theatric center of Europe at the time. Still, imagining
what I think of as an essentially English tale - almost untranslatable - being first played auf Deutsch, I cannot help feeling a
bit the fool. But then the play was next performed in the US, also in German, the next spring. That New York was still supporting a
thriving German culture almost 100 years ago to the day (March 24th, 1914), tells us just how much this country was changed by the wars
which first broke out later that year. The original Pygmalion, as opposed to it's modern singing variant, also ends on a more
Teutonic downnote with Eliza and Henry not together.
I suppose the feminist in me approves of Eliza's scorning of Professor Higgins, now that I better understand his character flaws. To the
younger version of me they were not at all obvious. I still remember my mother explaining to me why Eliza was mad when she blew up at
Higgins after their success at the party. The knowledgeable Henry Higgins with his wall of books seemed the paragon of manhood. Indeed,
until reading Pygmalion I did not pick up on a number of his flaws; the written language is ever more explicit than the spoken.
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