George Bernard Shaw thought he knew exactly what Pygmalion was about.
His audiences had other ideas.
What begins as an outrageous experiment—can Professor Henry Higgins transform a Cockney flower girl into a lady simply by changing the way she speaks?—becomes something much larger: a brilliant argument about class, language, identity, education, independence, and the strange relationship between a creator and his creation.
In this Chesterton Radio deep dive, we meet the remarkable and argumentative George Bernard Shaw, trace Pygmalion back to the ancient myth that gave the play its name, and explore what really happens to Eliza Doolittle when Higgins teaches her to speak like a duchess.
Then the story takes another turn.
We follow Pygmalion through its celebrated 1938 film adaptation and into Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady—one of the most beloved musicals ever written.
But something changed along the way.
Shaw resisted the idea that Higgins and Eliza belonged together. Audiences kept seeing a romance. My Fair Lady embraced an emotional relationship that Shaw spent years trying to push away.
So did the musical betray Shaw’s Pygmalion?
Or did Lerner and Loewe discover something in Eliza and Higgins that even their creator couldn’t entirely control?
It leads to a wonderfully appropriate question for a story called Pygmalion:
Who owns a great story—the author who creates it, the artists who reinterpret it, or the audience that falls in love with it?
And perhaps the greatest irony is that Shaw wrote a story about a creator losing control of his creation.
Then Pygmalion escaped from him too.
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