Monday, April 4, 2011
Acts I&II Pygmalion
I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I never knew that Pygmalion and My Fair Lady were essentially the same thing. I have watched the musical My Fair Lady several times and heard the play Pygmalion brought up in discussions and never connected the two. That kind of thing is pretty common though. Someone will write something based on another authors work and it becomes well known to the general population, overshadowing the original work. The dazzling Audrey Hepburn can probably take a lot of the credit for this particular situation. I remember watching the movie when I was very young and singing along with the catchy rhymes like "the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain". The contrast of the willful and unlearned Liza to the gentlemanly manner of Higgins was always something that entertained me. One of the scenes that stood out to me was when Liza was at the horse race and starts getting all worked up and yelling obscenities at the horse they had bet on- something along the lines of "move your bloomin' arse!". Her character was endearing because even though she may have transformed into a lady, in the end she never lost her spunk. Another quote I recall is when she was trying to make lady like conversation and made a comment like "gin was mothers milk to her". I can only guess that lines like this must have come directly from Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. So far the play is very entertaining. I find myself paying close attention to the way in which it is written since I do not read many plays. It is interesting to note the little details that playwrights add in so that the play can be directed in the manner in which the writer imagined.
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Hey Constance,
ReplyDeleteI too am new to this play and have never actually seen "My Fair Lady" either; however, I feel that this idea is not new to me. Since it is an extremely popular play, I know I've at least heard the story in some sort of other form. The pairing of Liza and Henry is timeless. I must have seen this a thousand times before in stories, movies, and even television shows. On one hand you have the wild-child Liza- in desperate need of guidance and how to do/say things correctly and on the other you have Henry: the teacher who will forever change this girl’s life. Although physically reading the play is a first for me, I feel that most people already have a feel for the story and have seen it alluded in movies or television.
I see your point about how film adaptations of some books become much more popular than the original works and overshadow them, as there are plenty of examples of this. I don’t know how popular the 1938 Pygmalion movie was when it came out then, but I could see how the actual play could have been pretty close in popularity, as it “both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914” (back cover of Pygmalion book). Nevertheless, many people back then probably preferred to watch the movie over reading the play. This preference of an electronic medium sort of goes back to the first article we read this semester about people reading less but watching more t.v. and doing things with electronics for entertainment rather than reading a book. The people don’t feel like having to sift through all of the text of the play; they just want to be casually entertained and be able to actually see the characters on screen so they don’t have to imagine how the characters may look and act like.
ReplyDeleteThat’s interesting how you have seen the musical My Fair Lady but are just now making that connection between the musical and Shaw’s play Pygmalion. It can be helpful to have some idea of a text, albeit it is a movie “based” on the play, before starting to read the original play. You have to be careful, though, about letting the layers of cultural experience, as we talked about in class, getting in the way of your understanding of the actual play. I guess we’ll find out as we continue reading the play whether or not Eliza keeps her spunk after she transforms into a lady, as she does in the musical.