In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

MY FAIR LADY' My Fair Lady is a very charming musical comedy and I'm told that The Chocolate Soldier was an equally charming operetta. Both are made from plays by Bernard Shaw. Neither of them was authorized by him. It can, of course, be asserted that Mr. Shaw would have authorized My Fair Lady had he had the opportunity. I doubt this, for My Fair Lady is un-Shavian in spirit and cancels out most of the points that are made in Pygmalion. The ending of ihe work has been changed but that's the least of it. The whole second act of the musical -and it only has two acts-is much weaker than the first one and this is because it is even less Shavian. The adapters may have begun by making only small changes in the last'five minutes of the play but these changes became larger and made others necessary back and back and further back into the action. Even the characters had to be changed. Higgins, who had been the very type of an eccentric professor, becomes an average man and is celebrated as such in a song. It can scarcely be denied, I think, that the dramatic ideas of the author, Mr. Alan J. Lerner, are extremely dull. My point here is rather that they are also un-Shavian. I recall an article of Mr. Lerner's in which he declared Shaw's ending to be too logical. His own, we were asked to believe, was much more real. The exact opposite of this seems to me to be the truth. Eliza's leaving Higgins is the outcome of the realities of the situation. The notion that she would marry him springs from a very cool calculation as to what the public would lick its chops over. One is drama; the other, musical comedy. That is to say, one is human reality in its richness; the other a facile daydream. Mr. Shaw presented the dynamics of real human conflict. Mr. Lerner cheats and presents pleaSing illusions according to a well-established formula. Mr. Shaw's play, like all Mr. Shaw's plays, begins in parody of romance and melodrama. The people who make films and musical shows out of Mr. Shaw's plays go back to a point before the beginning. They return to that very romance and melodrama which Mr. Shaw spent all his energies getting away from. Certainly he is their friend in that his prose raises the level of their entertainment wherever they quote it without change. But they shouldn't ask to be regarded as his friends as their whole effort is to undo what he spent the best part of a century dOing. I recommend, then, that you attend My Fair Lady but leave in the interval, go home and read the last act of Pygmalio.j. Even in the 1. By pennission of The ShavialJ, Summer Number, 1958. 135 136 ERIC BENTLEY September interval you can sell your ticket for enough money to buy the collected works of Bernard Shaw with. ERIC BENTLEY ...

pdf

Share