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The Funeral Chapel
Watch a clip from the 1964 film
About the Story
“Not bloody likely!”
With showstoppers such as “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly”, “The Rain in Spain” and “On the Street Where You Live”, this family favorite will have you on your feet and dancing all night!
Henry Higgins boasts to acquaintance Colonel Pickering that he is a master of phonetics, capable of turning the most common of voices into the upper crust accent of the aristocracy. Pickering points to Eliza Doolittle, a young flower girl whose own cockney accent is so strong that it spurs the gentlemen’s interest.
Eliza arrives at Higgins’ house seeking elocution lessons. Intrigued, Pickering bets that Higgins cannot transform her and convincingly pass her off as a Duchess at the Annual Embassy ball.
Pupil and teacher clash hopelessly in the various speech exercises, until at last they make a break through. In order to test her new found diction Higgins takes Eliza to the Ascot races where she naturally adapts to her genteel surroundings. In a moment of comic brilliance she forgets herself and cries out to the horses in full cockney vulgarity.
At the Embassy Ball they succeed in fooling society into believing that she is a Hungarian princess, even convincing one of Higgins’ rivals of her superior birth. The exuberant men return home, congratulating one another on their success, excluding Eliza from their praise. Furious at being thus neglected she leaves her volatile relationship with Higgins apparently at an end.
He tries to forget her, only to realize that he has grown accustomed to having her around. Whilst listening to records of her, she returns, and the two happily revert back to their familiar ways.
Literary Context
Based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, My Fair Lady is a classic story of a common young lady who is transformed into a well spoken aristocrat for a bet. Centred around the popular ‘pygmalion myth’ (whose origin dates back to Ovid’s Metamorphoses) in which a sculptor fell in love with the statue he had carved, the play shows Higgins growing attached to his ‘project’, enjoying her lively and sometimes (erratic/capricious) nature. Shaw was adamant that despite common belief/preference Higgins was not in love with Eliza, that they were to remain close throughout life and that she would marry Freddy. In an attempt to set the public’s ‘happy ending’ awry, he wrote “Sequel: What Happened Afterwards” a fictional essay on the continuing lives of his characters. The ending of the musical film adaptation is much more ambiguous, yet it is faithfully taken from the 1938 film Pygmalion.
