In today’s world, he’d be cancelled before you could say “wouldn’t it be loverly”. So much has changed since Shaw first wrote about Eliza - women still could not vote when the play came out - but sit down to watch My Fair Lady now and it’s fascinating to see, in Henry Higgins, the kinds of behaviours and attitudes women still have to contend with, even if there are new names for it: toxic masculinity, gaslighting and - Higgins is a master at this - mansplaining. Shaw’s own genius in carving out Eliza’s story was in exposing issues around feminism, class and sexism in early 1900s Britain, skewering all of it with the kind of biting satire that still manages to resonate more than 100 years later. In October, the story of Eliza’s transformation from 'squashed cabbage leaf' to perfectly spoken high-society lady, courtesy of condescending phonetician Prof Henry Higgins, will arrive at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin And you often find that in these great plays by people like Shakespeare, or the great Irish writer Shaw, that characters like Juliet or Eliza are not only brilliant but actually kind of geniuses, much like the writers themselves.” She’s just extraordinary in how quickly she learns. Sher expands on Eliza Doolittle’s genius: “What Higgins didn’t realise to begin with, in his choice of Eliza, was that he had picked someone who was incredibly intelligent when it comes to her ability with language. In October, the story of Eliza’s transformation from “squashed cabbage leaf” to perfectly spoken high-society lady, courtesy of condescending phonetician Prof Henry Higgins, will arrive at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin. All summer it’s been playing in the Coliseum theatre in London’s West End. Described as a “wunderkind” of New York theatre, Sher is the man behind the Tony-nominated revival of the musical four years ago in Manhattan’s Lincoln Centre. He’s talking about cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle, George Bernard Shaw’s most famous creation, the woman at the centre of his 1913 play Pygmalion, which later became a sumptuous Broadway show starring Julie Andrews and, in 1956, a multi-Oscar winning Hollywood movie musical starring Audrey Hepburn. “Eliza is a kind of a genius,” says award-winning theatre director Bartlett Sher.
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