Pygmalion [excerpts]

Summary: 1954 live outside broadcast of excerpts from the first three acts of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion presented before an invited audience at St James’ Theatre, London.
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: Monday 22 March 1954
Time: 9.05-9.55pm
Channel: BBC Television
Production company: BBC

Presented for Television by

Alan Chivers

Theatre Director

John Clements (1910-1988)

Playwright

[George] Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Set Designer

Laurence Irving

Costume Designer

Elizabeth Haffenden

Cast

Origination: Live from theatre
Vision original: Monochrome
Notes: 'The curtain goes up on the portico of St. Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, and speedily we are introduced to the Eynsford Hills, to Higgins, the authority on phonetics, to Colonel Pickering [...], another authority, and to Eliza, the bedraggled hoyden of a flower-girl. The new scene is Higgins’s study, where soon we encounter that glorious representative of ‘the undeserving poor,' Alfred Doolittle [...]. And we have enough of the third act in which to meet Higgins’s mother [...] and to see Eliza’s explosive entry into polite society’ (Radio Times, 19 March 1954, p. 20).
Extant status: No archival copy is known to exist.
Play tags: class issues / differences

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