The most suitable play for teacher appreciation

“PYGMALION”, BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1914)

“Pygmalion” is possibly the most suitable theater play for a teacher appreciation activity. “Pygmalion” both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw's feminist views. In Shaw's hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in polite society. The one thing he overlooks is that his 'creation' has a mind of her own. Shaw radically reworks Ovid's tale with a feminist twist: while Henry Higgins successfully teaches Eliza Doolittle to speak and act like a duchess, she adamantly refuses to be his creation. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was one of the most prolific writers of the modern theater. He won the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature. “Pygmalion” is funny, very entertaining and also very deep. It tells a lot about teachers and students, about teacher appreciation and about care and affection toward students.


Back to Ideas for teacher appreciation: older students