PYGMALION
But you don’t spend five acts striking sparks between a man and a woman only to have the woman go off at the end to some other fellow. The romantic actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who in 1914 played Higgins in the first British production of Pygmalion (opposite Shaw’s erstwhile lover, Mrs. Stella Patrick Campbell), devised a bit of stage business just before the final curtain to indicate an inevitable wedding between the prickly professor and his presumptuous pupil. Shaw hated it, but audiences loved it. (“My ending makes money; you ought to be grateful,” Tree wrote Shaw in a letter. “Your ending is damnable: you ought to be shot,” retorted the playwright.)
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Prissy and petulant, he stalks about his office like a puffed-up pigeon, but at his mother’s home he’s as obedient as a chastened schoolboy. When he proclaims himself a “confirmed old bachelor,” he’s not just bragging, he’s clinging desperately to a rationalization for his sexual insecurity. And when Eliza walks out on him–virtually forced to reject him by his bitter obstinacy–he neither barks with laughter, as Shaw originally dictated, nor sends a coy signal of regret; he sits stiff and still, determinedly–and self-destructively–alone. It’s a disturbing end to a play and a production that bounds brilliantly from giddy gaiety to stinging satire to serious social debate. The searing final battle between Eliza and Higgins perfectly unites comedy and drama.
