Pygmalion
by Amir Reza Koohestani and Mahin Sadri after the comedy by George Bernard Shawby Amir Reza Koohestani and Mahin Sadri after the comedy by George Bernard Shaw
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Content description
A contemporary retelling of Shaw’s play, which became world-famous as the musical «My Fair Lady»: Professor Higgins is tinkering in the language lab with an app that can analyze the speaker’s origin. He promises the drama student Liza a contract at the national theater if she trains away an accent that only specialists like him can even hear.
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You are who you speak like. Phonetics professor Higgins bets with his friend Pickering that he can turn the energetic Eliza Doolittle—who barely gets by selling flowers on the street and speaks only the broadest dialect—into a perfectly articulating lady of the upper class in no time. Eliza proves to be a disciplined and talented student and succeeds in her first appearances in high society. Higgins attributes the success to his own genius and reflexively claims credit for it. It escapes his perception that Eliza, not least through his teaching, develops into a self-confident and reflective woman who not only knows how to make her own decisions but also how to carry them out.
George Bernard Shaw created his most famous female character in his adaptation of the Ovidian myth Pygmalion—which is also an important motif in Shakespeare’s «Winter’s Tale». Even though she is the heroine of a comedy subtitled «A Romance», she particularly embodies the political ideals of the author, who, as a committed socialist, advocated for women’s emancipation and universal suffrage.
After Shaw’s death, the musical «My Fair Lady» was created based on his play. It examines issues of injustice related to gender and class less sharply but made him world-famous. Like in «Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy», «Prima Facie», and «The Copenhagen Trilogy», «Pygmalion» tells a story of female empowerment in a male-dominated society.
The Iranian director Amir Reza Koohestani has been known in Europe for many years for his finely thought reinterpretations of well-known works. Together with the Iranian playwright Mahin Sadri, he interrogates Shaw’s comedy—which premiered in 1913 at the Vienna Burgtheater—through the lens of today’s discourse on classism:
«Eliza is a woman from the working class who belongs nowhere: neither to her father, who drinks and shows no interest in her, nor to the professor who exploits her for his vanity. The struggle for the definition of her own self, her own identity, is at the core of our approach to Shaw’s play.»
Amir Reza Koohestani and Mahin Sadri
Artistic Direction
