My Fair Lady

Prof Henry Higgins – a bachelor and recognised professor of language and phonetics is prowling the streets of London, recording local spoken dialects. He is noting down the conversations of a cockney flower girl ‘Eliza Doolittle’ when he is discovered by the local street goers and mistaken for a police detective (a “tec”). This encounter leads to a chance meeting with ‘Col. Hugh Pickering’ also a noted British linguist just back from India. Higgins boasts to Pickering that he could transform the unrefined, dirty, cockney flower girl (Eliza) into a refined Victorian lady and pass her off at any high society social function as a member of the aristocracy.

Pickering proposes a wager with Higgins that he can’t do it. Ignoring the emotional effect this may have on the girl and the consequence of what to do with her when they have finished, Higgins accepts. Eliza, full of pride and misunderstanding, turns up on Henrys doorstep and offers to pay for her tuition and unknowingly becoming their test case. Eliza hopes that once tutored she will be able to work in a shop however, all fail to foresee what is to become of her. Eliza’s father (Alfred P. Doolittle) another cockney with a gift for rhetoric upon hearing of Eliza’s ‘turn of fortune’ expresses his concern to Higgins but even with the conflicting realities of social injustice, turns a blind eye in favour of a small some of money.

After many weeks of hard work, long hours and little sleep, to everyone’s joy and relief, the transformation takes place. Ascot is chosen as the venue to test Eliza where Mrs Higgins (Henrys mother) has a race course box where she invites all her aristocratic friends. Mrs Higgins is shocked when she hears her son is bringing a common flower girl to Ascot, but, after their introduction, Mrs Higgins mother takes a shine to Eliza as does Freddy Eynsford-Hill, a young gentleman who falls madly in love with Eliza. Freddy is so besotted with Eliza that he camps outside Higgins house just to be ‘on the street where she lives’. Henry Higgins thus wins the wager but what now becomes of Eliza as Henry has grown accustomed to her face and can’t contemplate life without her presence.

The musical “My Fair Lady” is based on the book Pygmalion – a classic book written by George Bernard Shaw, a writer very local to Welwyn – living in Ayot St. Laurence. Shaw’s Pygmalion retells a myth by Ovid, in which a man creates and falls in love with a female statue. The goddess of love takes pity on the man, and brings the statue to life. “My Fair Lady” turns a drama of mythological weight into a light hearted musical comedy.
When George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion, nearly a century ago, no one could have predicted his play would eventually be converted into one of the great musicals of our time.

“The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like” -George Bernard Shaw (born Dublin 1856) “My Fair Lady” made theatre history when it opened on Broadway. Waiting for tickets to see a show was something unheard of for a musical. The original stage cast included Julie Andrews (as Eliza), Rex Harrison (as Higgins) and Stanley Holloway (as Alfred P Doolittle)