Pygmalion [excerpt]

Summary

1954 BBC production of J. M. Barrie’s mystery Shall We Join the Ladies?, presented from the Vanburgh Theatre, London as part of a broader programme titled We Live to Please, a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which opened with a discussion of the early years of RADA in the studio. The performances thereafter presented were excerpts from Pygmalion, Othello and The Lady’s Not for Burning, followed by what was possibly a full production of Shall We Join the Ladies?

Theatre play

Pygmalion by [George] Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) [more information]

Play synopsis

'Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women’s independence’ (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_%28play%29, accessed 29 Janaury 2013).

Production history

Shaw wrote Pygmalion in 1912. It premiered in Vienna in 1913, in a German translation. The first American production opened in March 1914 at the German-language Irving Place Theatre, New York, and its delayed London premiere opened in April of the same year (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_%28play%29, accessed 29 Janaury 2013).

Date of transmission

Sunday 20 June 1954

Channel

BBC Television

Production company

BBC

Credits

Producer

Eric Fawcett

Playwright

[George] Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Cast

Nuna Davey	Mrs Pearce
Margaret Lockwood	Liza
Sebastian Shaw	Higgins
Arthur Young	Pickering

Additional details

Extant status

No archival copy is known to exist.

Play tags

class issues / differences

Print sources

Title

Class and classic (Magazine review)

Author/creator

Philip Hope-Wallace (Author)

Reference

The Listener, 1 April 1954, pp. 586-87

Title

Radio Times, 18 June 1954 (Magazine)

Linking notes

listing, p. 14; article, p. 15

Associated programmes

Othello [extract] (BBC, 1954)
Othello by William Shakespeare
BBC Television

Shall We Join the Ladies? (BBC, 1954)
Shall We Join the Ladies? by J. M. Barrie (1860-1937)
BBC Television

The Lady’s not for Burning [extract] (BBC, 1954)
The Lady’s not for Burning by Christopher Fry (1907-2005)
BBC Television