WOULDN'T GET MADE NOW

Works of art often rely on support, financial or otherwise, to reach the public. Paul Taylor, the theatre critic of the Independent, continues our Intelligent Life mini-series on classics that might not get a green light today.

PYGMALION

George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” has had a long and happy life, first as a play (1913), then as a stage musical (1956) and finally as a classic film (1964). But if it had come along today, Shaw’s entire concept would be found wanting. In our era of job-swap, wife-swap and life-swap programmes, it would not be Professor Higgins conducting a social experiment to prove the arbitrariness of class distinctions by training a cockney flower girl to disguise her origins by talking posh. Our appetite for the inauthentic and provisional would demand that the professor and Eliza Doolittle switch roles for a week, with Eliza faking it as a phonetician and Higgins turning all gorblimey while flogging blooms in Covent Garden. ~ PAUL TAYLOR

Picture credit: "Pygmalion and Galatea" by Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Metropolitan Museum of Art