George Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion

When professor of phonetics Henry Higgins wages with Colonel Pickering that he could teach even a gutter-mouthed flower seller how to speak like a duchess, little does he expect that his social experiment will be riddled with difficulties, and that, behind her cockney parlance, the girl in question, Eliza Doolittle, has a mind, ideas and aspirations of her own. Things come to a crux when the creature starts to rebel against her creator – and the scene is set for a play that questions the class system, social appearances and the role of women in society. Universally regarded as Shaw's most successful work for the stage, Pygmalion – here presented in its original 1916 version, with a wealth of extra material, including the author's subsequent revisions and additions to the text – has spawned a great number of screen adaptations, among them the famous 1956 Broadway musical My Fair Lady, and shows ancient myth's undiminishing ability to find new incarnations in modern life.