Pygmalion: 1st Response

This is absolutely one of my favorite plays. I've read it numerous times, although I've only seen it performed once or twice, and have also seen the musical adaptation My Fair Lady, which I enjoy enough, but I have to evaluate it separately from the play, being that the movie is edited to have that oh-so-Hollywood ending.

Aside from the obvious points to admire, such as the clever mythological allusion in its title (I'm a bit of a mythology buff, mostly as a hobby, and it always excites me when some of that usually useless knowledge comes in handy), perhaps one of the things I most enjoy upon repeated readings is Shaw's stage directions. As a reader of many plays, and a writer of one woeful attempt, I am used to stage directions being sparse and utilized only when necessary to clarify some issue of mechanics in the scene. In fact, previous play writing classes have all suggested to me that the "proper style" of stage directions is as few as possible to convey the point. Shaw gleefully ignores this provision in favor of providing the rich detail that I feel really helps create the scene, both in the mind of a reader (although this is obviously not the works intended audience) and the mind of a director. Without some of these incredibly specific descriptions, I feel that it would be difficult for the play to maintain its consistency of message across different performances, because some of those descriptions, such as the one for Eliza's entrance, are specific not simply because of the author's whim, but because the circumstances of the setting of the play require that level of exactitude.

I also am consistently impressed by the Technical Note at the beginning of the play, wherein Shaw acknowledges that some of the scenes he has written would be well nigh impossible to stage in a regular theater. Again, in my experience, one of the things that typically defines a well-written play is the absence of impossibilities like that, simply for the sake of its staging. However, even as Shaw includes these scenes (the first instance being that of Eliza arriving at her domicile in the taxi cab), he marks them off clearly. The play is written to stand without these inclusions: the plot still makes sense, and the audience comes away with much the same story. To me, though, those scenes are crucial, both as a reader of the play, being able to collect so much extra information that only serves to further enrich the piece, and also, potentially, as an actor. Whether or not these extra scenes are being performed in a particular run of the play, the knowledge of those in-between events, and the characters behavior in them, could be very useful to an actor looking to strengthen their performance by providing background information that would otherwise have to be inferred from the text (although this is often a necessary skill, I have found that many prefer strong, specific support for their character choices, rather than having to make these inferences).

Despite my familiarity with the piece, I find myself still discovering new things to enjoy about it. I look forward very much to class discussion!