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    Pygmalion
    Pygmalion
    Pygmalion
    Audiobook2 hours

    Pygmalion

    Written by George Bernard Shaw

    Narrated by Anton Lesser, Lucy Whybrow, Full Cast and Geoffrey Palmer

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    About this audiobook

    Pygmalion remains one of the most popular stories – but mainly in the medium of the musical; the evergreen My Fair Lady. But much of the charm and wit comes from the words and timing in Shaw’s original play. Here are the characters of Professor Higgins, his friend Colonel Pickering, and their charge, Eliza Doolittle. Directed by John Tydeman, this delightful comedy is presented in its original play version, with the extended narrations setting the background and concluding the drama – a device perfectly suited to Audiobook.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateAug 1, 2009
    ISBN9789629546984
    Author

    George Bernard Shaw

    George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 and moved to London in 1876. He initially wrote novels then went on to achieve fame through his career as a journalist, critic and public speaker. A committed and active socialist, he was one of the leaders of the Fabian Society. He was a prolific and much lauded playwright and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in 1950.

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    Reviews for Pygmalion

    4/5

    102 ratings40 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I'm a huge fan of My Fair Lady, so this was an interesting experience. The two are very similar, though MFL added and expanded on scenes and left some out. The ending of Pygmalion was far more ambiguous than MFL, however Eliza appears to have become more independent than in the musical. I still prefer MFL, but this was pleasant.
    • 5/5
      "I'm a good girl I am!" Required reading for every "My Fair Lady" fan. I think this is one example of the play/movie doing justice to the author's original work!
    • 3/5
      The book was okay. I would rate it a 5 out of 10.
    • 3/5
      Come on, it is classic ! The story is pretty simple, though truly charming. I wish I was Eliza Doolittle !
    • 3/5
      I didn't like the attached ending in the book. There was no real need to go into what happens to Eliza after the play ends.
    • 3/5
      Pygmalionby George Bernard Shaw 1916Washington Square Press 3.9 / 5When Henry Higgins, a linguist, meets cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle, he makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can teach her to speak such perfect English that she could pass as a duchess in polite High Society.He forgets that Eliza is an independent woman, and will not be bought and coddled. Classified under the genre of romance by many, to me, it was also a study of class relations and the perceptions and attitudes towards gender that were prevailing at that time, early 1900's. I really enjoyed the book, but gave it only 3.9 stars. Why? Henry Higgins. The characters are so well developed with a depth and diversity, I felt an instant understanding of them. I just did not like Higgins. At all.This was first a stage play, introduced to the public in 1913, and first printed in 1914. This went on to be the musical 'My Fair Lady' and is an unforgettable book.
    • 4/5
      Other than the amusing OCD-ness of Shaw's (pages of) stage directions, I found this an enjoyable play. Though My Fair Lady did stick very close, almost word for word, to this play, I thought that many of the characters were made more jovial and positive in the film. Higgins particularly is very serious in the play and sticks to his ways; in the film his character becomes softer and less strict.There are also a number of similarities with Shakespeare's 'Taming of the Shrew'; Higgins tames Eliza in a similar fashion. The ending of the play is frustrating. Shaw doesn't round it off in the play scrip, but in an added prose piece at the end.
    • 5/5
      This play has been a favourite of mine, and, somehow, I identified with the heroine. Having learnt English as a foreign language was an interesting experience, and, like her, I could not unlearn what I had taken great pains to learn. So when she decided to take action against her tutors, she was on an equal footing, because she had really become a 'lady', but in one of her tutor's eyes, she was still a flower-selling girl. It was wrong of them to think that their teaching would have for sole consequence a change of language and behaviour, as the transformation had gone deeper than that. The musical movie based on it is 'My fair lady', but is more American than English. Nonetheless, to read and see both is quite a good way to see how the play was understood. The play is highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      A geniunely funny and charming play, with a fascinating message about the function of manners with regards to a class-based society. The characters are lovable and entertaining, even if some of them are more human than others. Higgins will always be amusing to watch, no matter how you slice it: he is an immature, overly-cultured little boy whose intellect so eclipses emotion that, to him, intellectual pursuits are passion. Eliza is also fun, after she somehow develops a sharp mind with Higgins' cultivation.However, I had one major criticism that almost ruined the entire play for me. Call me a swooning, hormonal romantic, but I really wanted Eliza and Higgins to get together in the end! I perfectly understand Shaw's explanation at the end about how they could never have married because not only is Higgins not the marrying type due to the admiration he holds for his mother, but because Eliza refuses to submit herself to him, to be the Galatea to his Pygmalion. But still, all that chemistry seems like so much of waste when she goes and marries Freddy, that love-struck milquetoast. I couldn't help but write a mental fanfiction about Eliza's private fantasy about Higgins comes true, in which they are stuck on a remote island together and she seduces him into "making love like any other man." Guess that's just the hopeless romance-whore in me.
    • 2/5
      An interesting play, I call it. It is much like the movie /My Fair Lady/. It’s fairly short.
    • 3/5
      I wasn't crazy about Pygmalion, but I liked it well enough, so it gets a solid three stars from me. I was expecting the story to be more about the process of Liza's transformation from flower girl to lady, but in actually it focused on the way she was treated by others.

      That being said, I think it's fascinating to look at how Liza views herself and her worth, and that she's so conscious of the importance of how others view her. She flat-out says as much to Pickering towards the end of the play. So often women are portrayed as self-deprecating and humble to the point of shaming themselves, but not so with Liza. From the very beginning she holds herself in high esteem, and gives Higgins the what-for when he doesn't see her as worth much.

      I am bothered by the fact that Higgins never apologizes for the way he objectifies and uses Liza, but I'm bothered even more so by his lack of even really seeing the problem. Liza explains how she feels to Higgins, but he just doesn't get it, saying that he treats everyone the same, so what does it matter? He has a deeply ingrained sense of self-importance and righteousness that got under my skin for the entire story and left me fuming when he never seemed to feel bad about any of it. But, that's life I guess, and it probably would have felt inauthentic if he had changed.

      I would recommend this if you're looking for:
      *a short read
      *something that's referenced a lot
      *a strong female character who steals the spotlight
    • 4/5
      A radio drama production of Shaw's classic tale of Eliza Doolittle and Professor Henry Higgins. The production is solid but not sparkling as with some other audio productions I've listened to from the BBC. However, the recording also includes a shorter radio play "The B Word" which is about the production of the play, GBS's relationship with Mrs. Patrick Campbell who played Eliza, and the scandal over the use of the word "bloody" towards the end of the first half of the play, which was a delight to listen to and worth the price of entry.
    • 2/5
      I'm not sure how I would feel about this book now, but as a high school freshman, this was the last thing I wanted to read.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this particular edition as it includes a "sequel". I have read this before but probably never with so much attention. The "learned Bernard" packs so much in 150 pages it would take one months to study the play thoroughly. Was it about class and gender, ignited by the memory of the changes brought about by the Great War? Or was it something more far-reaching, more contemporary, more futuristic?
    • 4/5
      Thought-provoking play where Higgins as a bet takes on a common flower-seller and trains her to pass as a 'lady'. Interesting 'sequel' where Shaw explains why Higgins and Eliza would never work as a romantic couple, and telling how Eliza lived beyond the play's ending.
    • 4/5
      Amusing play with some funny dialogue and enjoyable characters, but what really elevates it is the portions that Shaw wrote out demonstrating that he knew what the expectations of the audience were and how foolish such genre cliches often are. Awareness of his material and the average reader's thought process allows Shaw to force you to think more critically about what you've just consumed, which is always a plus in my book.
    • 3/5
      Leuk en vlot, spitse dialogen. Sociaal document: moeilijkheid van klasse te doorbreken. Verwijzingen naar Frankenstein zeer duidelijk
    • 4/5
      This is the original story that 'My Fair Lady" was based o. The original is more gritty and less huerous than the movie. Shaw, not at his best, but in his amusing phase.
    • 4/5
      I found myself very interested in this play. I knew a lot about it before reading it, but that didn't stop me being interested. It was funny, well written and I enjoyed it a lot.
    • 2/5
      I really didn’t like this play/book. Many details were lacking the meaning of the title “Pygmalion” was also unconnected and unannounced. The features were so lacking that it made the story quite jumpy. Things were not described well and it was difficult to follow.
    • 3/5
      George Bernard Shaw's play that was later adapted into My Fair Lady for stage and film. The plot turns on how the way a person speaks sets their social status; changing their speech allows a person to move in different circles. There is more depth in the social commentary, hinging on whether the changeling will be happy in their new circumstances, but the play is an enjoyable comedy at several levels. Read August 2011.
    • 4/5
      The play on which the musical 'My Fair Lady' is based. Two eminent linguists agree to educate a lower-class flower-girl and turn her into a lady. Excellent portrayal of the class-consciousness of the early 20th century, with some humour and great characterisations. Thought-provoking.
    • 5/5
      Utterly fantastic - one of my favourite plays. Though really...Eliza should have married Henry.
    • 5/5
      Pygmalion, in my opinion, is Shaw's piece de resistance (if that is how you spell it). It is a masterpiece. While I can simply leave it at that I am compelled to say a lot more about this play, but first, the plot.Two English gentlemen (and when I read this book I wondered if it was implied that they were homosexual) bet as to whether they can take a street urchin and turn her into a lady by teaching her how to speak proper English. They do and the experiment is successful, and the bet is won. However the problem is that the woman, Eliza, is left in a difficult position as despite the fact that she is now educated, she is still a woman and has all the rights of a woman - which is none. So, while Henry Higgins has proven that he can turn a street urchin into a lady, she is still a woman and is left in the situation that she cannot do anything with the education that she now has.This play is an attack upon education and upon the status of women in early 20th Century England. They simply had no rights and while they could learn and they could appear to move among the gentry, the fact that they were women relegated them to a second class status. It is said that the system of education was one of the areas that Shaw attacked in his plays, and in this play we see how despite Liza having an education, she knows that she can do nothing with it, and is not recognised as having an education.This play has spawned a lot of duplicates, one of them being a play by Willy Russell called Educating Rita. I read that book in year 11 when I returned to high school and my English teacher loved it because he believed that it showed us how an education can change us. After reading Pygmalion I believed that that play was left for dead (and still do). However there are differences, namely that the status of women in the mid-twentieth century had changed dramatically. However, the theme is still the same, in that a woman from the working class, through education, was able to lift herself out of the working class.Another spawn would be an Eddie Murphy movie called Trading Places. Here two incredibly wealthy men make a bet that they could turn a bum into a successful Wall Street Trader, and turn the successful Wall Street Trader into a common criminal. Like Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, they succeed, but further, they have no understanding of the power of education, because after turning the bum into a successful trader, they realise that they cannot simply send him back to the streets. He has become educated, and in becoming educated he has the power to fight back, which he does so successfully.It is a shame that Shaw has disappeared into relative obscurity. I do not see any of his plays being performed (though being stuck in the little backwater that is Adelaide means that we see very little in the way of good theatre, or more correctly, what I consider good theatre). Still, beggars can't be choosers, but the educated have the world at their doorstep.
    • 4/5
      I went into this warily because My Fair Lady has been a favorite movie. The preface sets the tone for the sharp commentary on Britain's class system. The play itself will be very familiar to anyone who has seen My Fair Lady. What wasn't familiar was the ending and here's where I found the most delight. My Fair Lady would have been a very different and much more interesting movie had it ended the way Shaw wanted.
    • 4/5
      A lovely, lovely story well-written, amusing, wonderful characters. A modern classic.
    • 5/5
      Man, I loved this play. Reminded me of Oscar Wilde - so much, actually, that I was surprised when I looked Shaw up and he apparently wasn't gay. It's really, really funny. And smart. Awesome shit, man. Awesome shit.
    • 3/5
      One of the few plays listed in my catalog. I've never spent much time looking into this side of literature - a shame, considering what's out there. I read - several times - this play simply because I had to, for the engrossing OU course "Introduction to the Humanities." A lot of it has stuck with me, and probably because of the exposure. Nicely done, GBS.
    • 4/5
      For those of us who are familiar only with the movie version titled My Fair Lady, the real story of this play might come as something of a surprise. It did to me! I don't want to spoil anything, but it's fascinating to see how the version starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn was changed to please its audience in 1964. Apparently the end of the play has been a tug-of-war between George Bernard Shaw and the public (and some critics) since its first performance in 1912. I have to say I'm with the public... sorry, George.This LA Theatre production is a live play that was recorded to create an audio performance. So along with the excitement and energy of a live recording, you also get the flaws: different volume levels as the actors move toward or away from the microphones, audience applause, etc. But, taking it for what it is, I enjoyed it very much. It is brilliantly acted; Shannon Cochran as Eliza is especially good. I also liked the actor who plays Mr. Doolittle, and really everyone performs well. It was fun to imagine the actors on a stage rather than in front of a microphone in a recording studio. The play is very witty and nonsensical, abounding in comic misunderstandings and hilarious reversals of cultural norms. It is, in a word, George Bernard Shaw. And yet for all its fun, it does address serious issues such as women's independence and the strict social class system that based so much of its value judgments on external accoutrements (like a person's accent). Very little is safe from Shaw's satirical eye, but somehow his characters escape being cardboard cutouts displaying particular vices. They're attractive and fun, even the selfish ones. It's the good humor behind everything that does it.Though this is certainly no studio production, it was very enjoyable. I'm not really one for reading plays; they are designed to be experienced as a performance, not a silent reading. If you can't see a play, the next-best thing is to hear it. I recommend it!
    • 4/5
      I loved this play but I found the ending so very unsatisfying. It is so abrupt and unfinished. It feels like he simply stopped writing in the middle of a thought and just walked away.