Shaw's Pygmalion

PYGMALION, one of Shaw’s most beloved plays, is the basis for the musical, My Fair Lady. A professor of phonetics makes a wager that he can pass a bedraggled Cockney flower girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility; the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women’s independence.