KINGDOM 1 Stage


The following is an extract from Act Two of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. Professor Henry Higgins is a speech and language expert. He met Eliza Doolittle the previous day selling flowers on a street corner. He took notes on her accent, which he regards as common and uneducated. The next day she tracks him down at his home.


Pay attention to the words in italics. These are instructions from the playwright, explaining how the action should play out.


Pygmalion


Next day at 11 a.m. Higgins’s laboratory in Wimpole Street. It is a room on the fi rst fl oor, looking on the street, and was meant for the drawing room. The double doors are in the middle of the back wall; and persons entering fi nd in the corner to their right two tall fi le cabinets at right angles to one another against the wall. In this corner stands a fl at writing-table, on which are a phonograph, a laryngoscope, a row of tiny organ pipes with a bellows, a set of lamp chimneys for singing fl ames with burners attached to a gas plug in the wall by an indiarubber tube, several tuning-forks of different sizes, a life-size image of half a human head, shewing in section the vocal organs, and a box containing a supply of wax cylinders for the phonograph.


Further down the room, on the same side, is a fi replace, with a comfortable leather-covered easy-chair at the side of the hearth nearest the door, and a coal-scuttle. There is a clock on the mantelpiece. Between the fi replace and the phonograph table is a stand for newspapers.


On the other side of the central door, to the left of the visitor, is a cabinet of shallow drawers. On it is a telephone and the telephone directory. The corner beyond, and most of the side wall, is occupied by a grand piano, with the keyboard at the end furthest from the door, and a bench for the player extending the full length of the keyboard. On the piano is a dessert dish heaped with fruit and sweets, mostly chocolates.


The middle of the room is clear. Besides the easy-chair, the piano bench, and two chairs at the phonograph table, there is one stray chair. It stands near the fi replace. On the walls, engravings; mostly Piranesis and mezzotint portraits. No paintings.


Pickering is seated at the table, putting down some cards and a tuning-fork which he has been using. Higgins is standing up near him, closing two or three fi le drawers which are hanging out. He appears in the morning light as a robust, vital, appetizing sort of man of forty or thereabouts, dressed in a professional- looking black frock-coat with a white linen collar and black silk tie. He is of the energetic, scientifi c type, heartily, even violently interested in everything that can be studied as a scientifi c subject, and careless about himself and other people, including their feelings. He is, in fact, but for his years and size, rather like a very impetuous baby ‘taking notice’ eagerly and loudly, and requiring almost as much watching to keep him out of unintended mischief. His manner varies from genial bullying when he is in a good humor to stormy petulance when anything goes wrong: but he is so entirely frank and void of malice that he remains likeable even in his least reasonable moments.


180


Piranesis: a famous artist mezzotint: a type of print


bellows:


tool that emits air when squeezed


shewing: showing


coal-scuttle: container for coal


genial: good-natured


malice: spite


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