Bedlam’s fresh but respectful take on Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’

Say a male phonetics professor rescues a female guttersnipe from the gutter, teaches her to speak the English of the upper classes, and passes her off as a duchess—what then? As nearly everyone will recognize, this is the situation presented by the Lerner and Lowe musical My Fair Lady and, before that, by Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, which is currently being presented by the Bedlam company in New York. Nowadays the play seems more obvious than it must have when it was first presented, roughly 100 years ago, in part because the musical has made the story familiar, in part because the source myth—that of Pygmalion and Galatea—is itself still familiar, and in part because numerous debates have made us well aware of the role language and speech play in social distinctions. Yet, if Shaw’s play is obvious, it’s also subtly provocative, and it’s capable of resonating in ways not anticipated by Shaw.