Endings

Read Shaw's Pygmalion today and wondered to myself about where the playwright's reputation stood these days. This thought was prompted by my realisation that in my several years as an examiner I haven't seen a single student answer on any play ever. And I don't recall anything by Shaw ever being set for 'A' level. By some strange quirk one of the plays I did for 'O' level (a long time ago) was Caesar and Cleopatra and even as a kid I sensed a lack of something, a kind of gravity I suppose, in the text. It suffered hugely from being teamed with the Bard's Julius Caesar. What an odd choice for that year the plays were! Also you don't much see Shaw in the theatre, as far as I know. The last time I watched any on stage was in Singapore some years ago, a first rate version of Heartbreak House - which had me wondering why Shaw isn't featured more often on the boards.

It's difficult to imagine Pygmalion being used as a text despite its enormous entertainment value. I suppose it's now fatally compromised as a play by Alan Jay Lerner's brilliant adaptation for musical theatre - which actually uses a fair proportion of the original dialogue. If anything Lerner's version makes more sense on stage, giving the audience the happy ending everyone really wants. And if the scenes between Eliza and Higgins are going to work, especially Shaw's Act 4 (equivalent to the stuff at the opening of Act 2 of My Fair Lady, after the ball) then there's got to be some chemistry on stage, and I'm talking sexual chemistry here, even of the most respectable kind - which is possibly the most powerful of all, in its way.

Old chum David Turner (father of the rather more famous Alex) always felt that Lerner's ending could be a tad improved. He reckoned Eliza might usefully tell Higgins to get his own slippers after the famous final line and I always thought he had a point. Higgins would have undoubtedly enjoyed the response and the audience would have been left with an image of an exceptionally interesting married life to savour on the closing of the curtain instead of just Higgins being insufferable as Eliza melts.