There's a reason why Pygmalion's been turned into a movie, a musical, and a movie musical. Shaw wrote the play in early 1912 and read it to famed actress Mrs Patrick Campbell in June. She came on board almost immediately, but her mild nervous breakdown contributed to the delay of a London production. Pygmalion premiered at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on 16 October 1913, in a German translation by Shaw's Viennese literary agent and acolyte, Siegfried Trebitsch. This play's so incredibly successful mostly because it confronts a truth universally acknowledged in the English-speaking world: even though English is a dynamic, changing language, there always seems to be only one "acceptable" ways to speak it. Pygmalion is a Shavian study of language and speech and their importance in society and in personal relationships. To correct the impression left by the original performers that the play portrayed a romantic relationship between the two main characters Shaw rewrote the ending to make it clear that the heroine will marry another, a minor character. This play has been adapted numerous times, most notably as the musical My Fair Lady and its film version. Shaw mentioned that the character of Professor Henry Higgins was inspired by several British professors of phonetics. Pygmalion remains Shaw's most popular play. You can listen online to free English audiobook “Pygmalion” by George Bernard Shaw on our website.
