# Pygmalion

> George Bernard Shaw's sharp, funny drama of a phonetics professor who wagers he can pass a flower girl off as a duchess by remaking her speech. Beneath the wit, a fierce argument about class, dignity, and who gets to be taken seriously.

Price: 9.50 USD · in stock

## About
A rain-soaked London evening, a scattering of strangers under a portico, and a man scribbling down the way a poor girl speaks: from that small scene Shaw builds one of the most durable comedies of the modern stage, a play that keeps laughing even as it sharpens its point.What it's aboutPygmalion follows a distinguished professor of phonetics who boasts that, given a few months, he could teach a Covent Garden flower seller to speak so well that fashionable society would take her for a lady. The experiment begins as a wager and a piece of intellectual vanity, but as the young woman is drilled, dressed, and displayed, the question of what has actually been made of her grows harder to answer. Shaw borrows the old myth of the sculptor who fell in love with his statue and turns it into a modern comedy of manners.ThemesThe play is a study of class as performance, in which an accent turns out to be a passport and a prison at once. Shaw probes the gap between transforming a person's surface and respecting her as a self, and he refuses the tidy romance the story seems to invite. Identity, gratitude, independence, and the casual cruelty of those who mean well are all under his scalpel.Why it still mattersAnyone who has ever been judged by how they sound will recognise the truth beneath the comedy. Shaw's insistence that dignity is not a gift bestowed by the powerful but a right of the person remains bracing, and his heroine's refusal to be merely someone else's creation still lands.Who it's forReaders who like their comedy with an argument inside it, lovers of the theatre, and anyone drawn to stories about self-making and the politics of speech.

## Specifications
- publisher: DotBooks
- language: en
- binding: Perfect Bound
- pages: 95
- format: paperback