For those who are completely unaware of what will be discussed now, we will explain that an attempt will be made to briefly outline the plot of the non-ancient myth of the sculptor Pygmalion, who fell in love with the beautiful statue of Galatea created by him and begged the gods to revive it, and the plays of the great English playwright Bernard Shaw.
Let's get started ... Act One
The full title of the play is: “Pygmalion: A Fantasy Novel in Five Acts.”
Not everyone is able to read plays from a sheet, and even there are not so many inveterate theater-goers left. The world is ruled by the Internet and television. Of course, Shaw’s works have been filmed more than once, and counting the number of productions is completely hopeless. But watching a movie takes hours, reading the text of the play is also not a quick task, and for those who want to save time and get an education, they came up with a summary.
“Pygmalion” - for the sake of brevity, for the sake of brevity, this is what we will call this play in - begins with rain. Yes, an ordinary summer downpour, under which almost all the acting characters of the work fell. They are standing under the portico of St. Paul’s Cathedral and waiting for a taxi. Mobile phones have not yet been invented, taxi call services did not work on the same scale as today, and in order for everyone to get home in a more or less dry form, someone alone had to sacrifice themselves. Who is this lonely hero? Naturally, the youngest and most reliable Freddy. But even when he completely got wet in the process of searching, he does not find a taxi, for which he receives a reprimand from his mother and from his sister in full. Hurrying to take shelter under the portico, Freddy brushes the poorly dressed girl with a basket of flowers. She does not remain in the loser, and with the typical commoners frankness she expresses everything that she thinks about clumsy young people in general and Freddy in particular. Having heard such interesting and somewhat poetic epithets, the gentleman standing a little aside hastily begins to write something into a laptop (notebooks used to be called notebooks).
The girl takes a logical marketing move and begins to advertise her product. In particular, he begs the Colonel who is standing next to purchase several violets and thereby support commerce. The colonel takes out a trifle and pays off from a clever tradeswoman, but at the same time he does not take a bunch of violets. Then someone notices with enthusiasm the stenographer, and suggests that he is writing a denunciation to the KGB (in the UK, of course, there is no KGB, but there is Scotland Yard). A general wave of indignation against police arbitrariness is rising. In order not to be lynched on the spot, the gentleman with the notebook very cleverly guesses the place of birth of some prosecutors. It completely gets away with it, but the people demand an immediate exposure of a session of black magic.
Everything turns out to be quite innocent, and instead of an intelligence agent, the public now sees a harmless linguist scientist in front of him. Unhappy Freddy is not allowed to watch the show to the end and is pushed out again in the rain, with the order without a taxi to not return. While Freddy wanders around London in search of a car, the rain suddenly ends, and his relatives decide that they can do without a taxi. The people are slowly dissolving, and as a result there are only three main characters:
florist
Eliza Dolittle, linguist-magician Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering. The latter two find out that they had long dreamed of meeting, but it didn’t work out, and if it hadn’t been for a blessed downpour, they would have chased one after another in India, then in England. Having reprimanded Elise for not doing well at school, she is completely incapable of speaking like educated white colonizers, and noting that she would not hurt to attend noble manners courses, they exchange their addresses, donate a bunch of little things to the saleswoman of violets and leave.
Something the first act turned out to be too long, and similar to anything, but not to a brief summary. Pygmalion consists of five acts. And at such a pace we will not get to the final of the play soon. In addition, it is completely incomprehensible what the ancient sculptor has to do with it. Let us hope that this will be clarified further and continue to set out our summary.
Pygmalion, Act Two
It begins in Professor Higgins’s apartment. Our linguist brags to the colonel about his recording equipment, the latter expresses his immoderate admiration for the quality and purity of sound. Their conversation is interrupted by a visit ... who would you think? You’ll never guess - Eliza Dolittle in person! She came to hire Higgins as a tutor in calligraphy and staging a competent speech. She remembered the address yesterday, as she herself believed that the money donated by two friends to her would be enough to buy the Buckingham Palace and get it in the burden of surrendering the Tower.
But the professor categorically states that she is not engaged in tutoring. However, having learned a lot of new and interesting information about herself and the colonel from Eliza, she suddenly decides to make her not just anyone, but a real duchess. And even refuses to charge for it. However, he is not such a lack of money, and he makes a bet with the colonel for a large sum that he will cope with this difficult matter in just a few months. No, it’s not about falsification of documents at all . In the play Pygmalion, which you are currently reading a summary of, there is no criminality at all. This is not a detective story or a thriller. The essence of the bet is that at the end of the training, Eliza is brought to the embassy, ​​presented not as a flower girl, but as a duchess, and they are waiting for their fraud to be revealed. While the housekeeper of the professor exposes Miss Dolittle to severe hygienic procedures, the girl's father is at Higgins' apartment. It turns out to be a battered life, but having a philosophical mentality and problems in family life, a scavenger. He expresses concern over the innocence of his only and beloved daughter, but for five pounds he agrees to strangle his paternal feelings.
Pygmalion "Show: a summary of the subsequent third and fourth acts
The professor mercilessly chases the unfortunate girl in the grammar and syntax of the English language, along the way teaching her to stay with high-society tact.
After a while, considering Eliza already sufficiently “savvy,” Higgins decides to give her a mini-exam and brings her to her own mother’s journal. There, by a strange coincidence, is the very mother of the unfortunate Freddy. Naturally, the young man begins to show signs of attention to Eliza, which cannot but please both his own mother and the professor himself. And the professor’s mom unexpectedly likes the girl.
The betting period is coming to an end, and Eliza brilliantly plays the role of the Duchess at the reception. Debaters tired of hassle rejoice that it is all over, congratulate each other on a job well done and disperse into their rooms. It never occurred to them to thank Eliza, since for them she was not a man, but a tool. Eliza, having spent a lot of effort and a bunch of nerve cells at the reception, is deeply offended by such a dismissive attitude towards her, and launches a pair of shoes at the smug professor.
Fifth - final action
The girl escapes from these two "blocks in suits." The next morning, not finding his usual toy at the doorway of the bedroom with slippers in his teeth, Pickering and Higgins run to complain to the mother of the latter, indignant at the ungrateful girl. And what is their surprise when, instead of the expected sympathy, they will receive a sharp rebuke. It turns out that Eliza came to Mrs. Higgins at night and poured out her insult to the gentlemen at midnight.
The play is rapidly moving to the finale, and our summary is also striving for it. Pygmalion does not end at all with the wedding ringing of bells, as you might hope. Not at all. Both Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering are not romantic heroes, they are not at all passionately in love with a young saleswoman of violets. They just got used to her, and now do not want to exist separately from Eliza. They express all this both to Eliza herself and to the professor’s mother. This ends the play, leaving the reader in a slight bewilderment about how the fate of the heroes will turn out. A curtain.