“Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!” Leonard Connoly exclaims. He didn’t change any lines, but he gave the audience exactly what they wanted to see: that Eliza and Higgins had been in love all along and that after the curtain fell, they’d be together. As Eliza was leaving, Higgins watched her go, and then gave her a look. At the end of the play, after Eliza "sweeps out," the actor playing Henry Higgins created a moment for himself - a moment Shaw never wrote and clearly didn’t want. The ending is unresolved, and that's just how George Bernard Shaw wanted it.īut when the play debuted, Shaw was in for a shock. Higgins hasn’t changed - he is still a pompous ass. Leonard Conolly, who taught Shaw at Trent University in Ontario, sees this as “sweeping clean her relationship with Higgins and heading off to a better, brighter future.” Shaw purposely left unclear what happens next. Then, according to Shaw’s final stage directions, Eliza "sweeps out." “If I can’t have kindness, I’ll have independence,” she declares. At the end of the play, after an enormous battle of wills, Eliza decides to strike out on her own. She can’t to go back to selling flowers and she doesn’t want to be Higgins’ secretary - or worse, his wife. Once Higgins wins his bet and completes Eliza’s transformation, she is stuck between two worlds. "It can be learned - and it can be fudged.” Dolgin says Shaw wanted to get rid of the whole class system and thought the play would prove his point. “What of as absolutely innate - social placement - is not," Dolgin says. “The play is really about language, and the idea that, through language, one can raise one’s social status, which is something really important for that era,” says Ellen Dolgin, vice-president of the International Shaw Society. In the play, stuffy professor Henry Higgins sets himself a challenge: to pass off Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower seller, as a duchess. He wanted to advocate for women’s suffrage and the end of Britain’s class system. With the help of Aphrodite, his wish comes true.īut Shaw didn’t set out to write a frothy, romantic confection. In the story, told by the Roman poet Ovid, a sculptor falls in love with his sculpture, Galatea, and prays for her to come to life. Shaw intended his play to change people’s minds about that. When Pygmalion premiered in April, 1914 - just months before the start of World War I - women still did not have the right to vote. well, by then, Shaw was likely spinning in his grave. For years, the ending of the play was misinterpreted and altered in a way Shaw loathed. And some savvy theatergoers know that it was based on the play Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw.īut few people know this story: When the play first opened, it was not performed as Shaw intended. The story of the Broadway musical My Fair Lady is familiar to people with knowledge of musical theater.
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