Pygmalion
by
George Bernard Shaw
Directed by Bonnie J. Monte
Director's
Message
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| Paul Niebanck as professor Henry
Higgins and Victoria Mack as Eliza Doolittle in PYGMALION.
Photo © Gerry Goodstein. |
"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.
It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without
making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and
Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible
even to Englishmen. The reformer England needs today is an
energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such
a one the hero of a popular play."
- From Shaw's preface to "Pygmalion"
"I shall never be able to begin a new play until I fall
in love with somebody else."
- Shaw to Janet A. Church (1895)
"There must be something radically wrong with the play
if it pleases everybody, but at the moment I cannot find what
it is."
- Shaw on "Pygmalion"
"Dearest Liar,
*I badly need some sort of humanizing*I have loved and have
survived it* I shall never quite get over it."
- Shaw to Mrs. Patrick Campbell (from various
letters written between 1912 and 1914)
"It was lonely to be myself; but not to be myself was
death in life."
- From Shaw's novel, Cashel Byron's Profession
"I found that I only had to say with perfect simplicity
what I seriously meant just as it struck me, to make everybody
laugh. My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the
right thing to say, and then say it with the utmost levity.
And all the time the real joke is that I am in earnest."
- Shaw on himself
"I am honored and famous and rich, which is very good
fun for the other people. But as I have to do all the hard
work, and suffer an ever increasing multitude of fools gladly,
it does not feel any better than being reviled, infamous,
and poor, as I used to be."
- Shaw to Frank Harris (1927)
"*it is Shaw's oeuvre that most matters; it is not by
the best of his work but by the body of it that he chiefly
stands forth as great. His characters approximate the population
of a thriving community, and indeed he gives us, as do Dickens
and Trollope, Balzac and Henry James, the sense not of a few
houses to live in or families to know, but of whole streets
to investigate, and squares to traverse, and passageways to
explore. And as with these other creators of large personal
worlds, there is a particular architecture about it all, a
special, characterizing light that hangs over it. And as with
Dickens - it is at once his huge merit and the key to his
faults - there is a sense of careless, limitless energy about
Shaw. We feel that he could have written twice again as much
as he did, while simultaneously suspecting that he wrote twice
as much as he should have.
What is additionally remarkable, beyond the several dozen
plays, is that he treated in them - or in retrospect seems
to have treated - several dozen subjects. He canvassed modern
life, from slums to throne rooms, from brothels to country
houses, from medicine to munitions, from phonetics to peace
conferences; he dove backward in time all the way to ancient
heroes and fabled beasts; he plunged forward into the wild
far future; he redecorated Hell and toned down Heaven. He
went everywhere, in fact, including a number of places that
do not - nor ever did - exist. But Shaw the traveler dwindles
beside Shaw the teacher: he has been guide, philosopher, and
enemy to almost every ism: and next only to the many things
he attacked are those he espoused; and next come the things
he attacked and espoused by turn.
*Shaw exalts dictators, he assails dictators; he hails poets,
he hoots at poets; he is the arch-priest of reason and then,
suddenly, of mysticism. No one ever had so many ideas - or
rather, so many ideas about ideas.
*Man (perhaps quite rightly, since he takes his own salvation
seriously) is not going to pin his faith on an evangelist
who is so good an entertainer. Besides, we are so constituted
as to desire, in our leaders, a certain gravity, even solemnity,
of manner: if not the frock coat, the clerical gown - but
at any rate not motley; if not the pious sigh, then the thundering
voice - but any rate, not buffoonery. And so, despite the
many things Shaw really cared about and militantly fought
for, or loathed and fiercely inveighed against, he has - by
virtue of seeing both sides of every argument and what is
funny in every situation or struggle - triumphed, not as a
philosopher but as a comedian."
- From the foreword to Shaw's "Androcles
and the Lion" in the collection Cavalcade of Comedy
"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to
hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence
of inhumanity."
- From Shaw's "The Devil's Disciple"
"I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no 'brief
candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have
got hold of for the moment; and I want to make it burn as
brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."
- "Art and Public Money", Sussex
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