Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw's feminist views. In Shaw's hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in...

After a lavish dinner party in a stately mansion, the guests believe themselves unable to leave the premises. As the days pass, the elaborate facades of their social positions collapse and they are forced to live like animals. Finally discovering they are actually free to leave, they go to church to give thanks, where they are again trapped.