萧伯纳: 窈窕淑女/SHAW: Pygmalion_KUKE库客数字音乐图书馆

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  SHAW: Pygmalion
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萧伯纳: 窈窕淑女 / SHAW: Pygmalion
[ 读物介绍 ]
Bernard ShawPYGMALION Invitation to A Sound Pygmalion ‘I liked the play. It was funny – wot I understood of it...I wish e’d found a better title. Who’s ter know that Pygmalion ‘ad anyfinkter do with a flower girl? ‘E mite ’ave called it From Flower Girl to Duchess.We should ’ave known wot it wos abaht then.’ Thus said Eliza Keele, a Charing Cross flower girl, asrather patronisingly trans-cribed from an interview with the Daily Expresswhich had treated her to a ticket to the play to test her reactions. Eliza Keele had a point. Just as the creators of theunauthorised musical version of Shaw’s Arms And The Man had changed its titleto The Chocolate Soldier, so those responsible for Pygmalion – The Musical hadaltered the title to My Fair Lady. Anodyne, uninformative, possiblyinaccurate, but more attractive to the mass ticket-buying audience. If Pygmalion then why not Galatea? Who? In ancient Greekmythology Galatea was the name of a beautiful ivory statue with which itssculptor, the mysoginist King of Cyprus, Pygmalion by name, fell deeply inlove. Taking pity on him the goddess Aphrodite blew breath into the statue andmade it come alive as a beautiful woman. Pygmalion then married his owncreation, which was something Shaw insisted did not occur between the creator,Professor Higgins, and the created, Miss Doolittle, in his play. I suppose the play could have been called ‘Pygmalion andGalatea’, but two Greek names would surely have been too heavy for a lightish,but serious, romantic comedy and the emphasis was intended to be on the artistrather than the model. The title of any successful work rapidly achieves itsown easy currency as can be seen from the long-running musical Les Misérablesand the even longer-running play called The Mousetrap. What is in a name oncesuccess has kissed it? Pygmalion also entered our language as a replacement for thesanguinary adjective Eliza had used which had so shocked the 1914 First NightWest-End audience that the show stopped ‘for a full minute, till the audiencehad done laughing.’ As a child I can remember the adults saying ‘not Pygmalionlikely’ instead of ‘not bloody likely’. In the film version of the musical theshock effect had, in the 1960s, to be achieved by the expression ‘move yourbloody arse’ shouted towards the rear end of a horse at the Royal Ascot Racemeeting.Needless to say, there was no Royal Ascot scene in theoriginal production which opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre on 11 April 1914,having been premiered in a German translation the previous year in Vienna. SirHerbert Beerbohm Tree, the actor manager at Her Majesty’s, rather wished therehad been such a scene. He tried to persuade Shaw to ‘open up’ the play. He wasfor spectacle while Shaw, who also directed the play, was for realism. DespiteTree’s somewhat hammy acting, Shaw’s rather wooden direction and the fact thatMrs Patrick Campbell herself admitted to being 25 years too old for LizaDoolittle, the waif flower girl, the play was an overnight success. This says agreat deal for the strength of the text. Shaw, who had taken to writing plays at the age of 42, was56 when Pygmalion appeared and it gave him financial security for the firsttime in his life. Although the outbreak of war in August 1914 prevented the projectedlengthy tour, the publication, in 1916, brought in more money by the sale ofbooks than royalties would have done in those days, even with long-runningplays. Pygmalion became one of the world’s best-known and mostpopular works in a variety of forms and numerous translations. Film versionswere made in Dutch and in German before Anthony Asquith’s 1938 English versionwith a script by GBS, for which he received an Oscar. It broke all previousbox-office records and ‘won the hearts of audiences and the plaudits of criticsall over the world’. It has been recorded for records, televised more than onceand has had innumerable airings on radio. It is a play of debate and of ideasand, as Shaw himself said in turning down a proposal to make a musical of it,‘it has its own music in the language’. There are great arias in it, certainlyfrom Higgins, Liza and Doolittle. Six years after Shaw’s death in 1950, My Fair Lady appearedon Broadway where it ran for six-and-a-half years. In 1957 it opened at DruryLane, where it ran for over five years. In 2002 an RNT production has returned,in transfer, to Drury Lane. The setting-up of a national theatre was a projectdear to Shaw’s heart and he would be gratified by the treatment he has receivedon the Thames’ South Bank, London. Then, of course, there is the film version of the Alan JayLerner and Frederick Loewe musical version of the stage version. It has to beconfessed that the majority of people will have become acquainted with thestory via the film My Fair Lady starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. RexHarrison put so profound a stamp on the role of Professor Higgins (as EdithEvans did with Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of BeingEarnest) that it is hard for any actor to follow him or to escape his rhythm ofspeech. Yet it is to be doubted if this really was the Higgins which Shaw hadin mind. His stage description says that he should be ‘an appetising sort ofman of forty or thereabouts… He is of the energetic, scientific type… interestedin anything that can be studied as a scientific subject.’ But the musical catches the essence of Higgins’ character,just as its very faithful book and lyrics capture, explore and even promote theessence of the original stage-play. So cleverly do the lyrics emerge out of thetext that during the rehearsals for this audio-recording the cast and crewwould slide easily into song: ‘Why can’t the English teach their children howto speak?’; ‘Lots of chocolates for me to eat; lots of coal making lots ofheat’. And then there are the elocution lessons: ‘By George she’s got it!’;(‘Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, Hurricanes Hardly Happen’ and ‘the rain inSpain stays mainly in the plain’ are not only extensions of Shaw’s text, theyare actually inventive improvements on it!). Then there is Higgins’ line in theplay text ‘And I have grown accustomed to your voice and appearance. I like themrather”. Cue for song: ‘I’ve grown accustomed to her face, etc., etc.’ The tension in Shaw is between mind and instinct, the joker,and the serious man of letters, the didactic pamphleteer and the entertainer.These paradoxes surround the contention that has always existed about theambiguous ending. Does she, or doesn’t she, marry Higgins? After all, Galateamarried Pygmalion or, rather, the other way round. When Tree played the ending in the ambiguous 1912 originaltext, he performed the ending the punters really wanted. Shaw was furious:‘Your ending is damnable. You ought to be shot’, he wrote. Tree retorted, ‘Myending makes money. You ought to be grateful.’ Commercially Tree was right, aswere Lerner and Loewe. Artistically one bows to Shaw. After all, Higgins, Liza,Doolittle, Pickering, Mrs Higgins and the Eynsford-Hills are Shaw’s creations,he’s their Pygmalion. There is nothing new in the rags-to-riches story, inCinderella and her Prince. But Cinders is a Baron’s daughter, Liza a commondustman’s (well, a fairly uncommon dustman in another sense). She is a doll whospeaks beautifully, knows how to move and to wear fine clothes. Although acertain spirit has been released, a Life Force generated, she is, after sixmonths’ tutelage, a lady in appearance only. She still seeks education,development of character. Shaw insists that it is not a fairy tale. Higgins ‘isnot Eliza’s lover… their marriage would have been a revolting tragedy’. Psychologically Shaw knew what he was talking about. Someyears ago I took my god-daughter, then aged about 15, to see the musical withits happy ending. She had not encountered the story before in any form. She hadloved it, except for the ending. ‘Eliza would never have come back,’ said youngModern Woman. How Shaw would have shouted in glee! So angry and insistent washe that he changed the ending slightly for the 1916 published edition and addedan Epilogue which explains what happens to the characters after the last spokenwords of the play in the ‘authorised version’. Higgins: ‘She’s going to marry Freddy. Ha! Ha! Freddy!Freddy!’ (he roars with laughter as the play ends). This Epilogue, delivered by the well-known Shawimpersonator, Denys Hawthorne, appears on the final disc of this recording. Shaw calls the play a Romance ‘because it is the story of apoor girl who meets a gentleman at a church door and is transformed by him intoa beautiful lady. That is what I call a romance.’ Shaw thought that all playsshould be about Ideas, and Pygmalion is no exception. The play, at times, takesthe form of a debate. As a Fabian Socialist, Shaw was critical of middle-classsociety and its values. He realised that people were judged, socially, by theway they spoke and by the clothes they wore. As the Daily Mail critic wrote inhis review of the play’s first night, ‘It is a comedy of modern manners, tingedwith social satire… laughter reigns supreme.’ Some of his earlier plays suffered from ‘too easilyrecognisable a didactic purpose’. As with the much later popular entertainmentplay, The Millionairess (remember the movie with Sophia Loren and Peter Sellersand the Bom-diddy-bom-diddy-bom-bom-bom heartbeat?). Shaw uses an abundance ofsugar-coating to conceal the bitter pill of social criticism at the centre ofthe piece.All works of art have a trigger. In the case of Pygmalion itwas Shaw’s fascination with phonetics and his desire to reform the Englishalphabet, allied to the death of Henry Sweet, a prominent phonetician, in 1912,the year in which he wrote the play. His own attempts to render cockney speechphonetically are dire and mercifully, he gives up the challenge after a fewspeeches of text. Mrs Patrick Campbell found the cockney dialect ‘verydifficult’ and she probably got about as close to rendering it as did thenotorious Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins! None of the problems of performance or production worriedthe Daily Telegraph reviewer of 1914. Shaw’s genius conquered all. ‘The play asa whole is a joyful piece of work. There is an abundant vigour in it, and thebest things come with such force and the worst have so much spirit, and thething marches on with such gaiety that you cannot resist it, nor do you wantto. It is a great joke ... it debates and dallies with all sorts of solemnsubjects in the midst of its fun … and goes gaily on.’ It invites us to laugh and to think. Accept the author’sinvitation – and ours. Notes by John Tydeman In the playscript, Bernard Shaw provided a preface. PREFACE TO PYGMALION A Professor of Phonetics As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface,but a sequel, which I have supplied in its due place. The English have norespect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. Theyspell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It isimpossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some otherEnglishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible toforeigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The reformer Englandneeds today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such aone the hero of a popular play. There have been heroes of that kind crying inthe wilderness for many years past. When I became interested in the subjecttowards the end of the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; butAlexander J. Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head alwayscovered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would apologize to public meetings ina very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, weremen whom it was impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lackedtheir sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to conventionalmortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was,I think, the best of them all at his job) would have entitled him to highofficial recognition, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, butfor his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in generalwho thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the days when theImperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was boomingthe Empire, I induced the editor of a leading monthly review to commission anarticle from Sweet on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived,it contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of languageand literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a phonetic expert only.The article, being libelous, had to be returned as impossible; and I had torenounce my dream of dragging its author into the limelight. When I met himafterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to my astonishment thathe, who had been a quite tolerably presentable young man, had actually managedby sheer scorn to alter his personal appearance until he had become a sort ofwalking repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It must have been largelyin his own despite that he was squeezed into something called a Readership ofphonetics there. The future of phonetics rests probably with his pupils, whoall swore by him; but nothing could bring the man himself into any sort ofcompliance with the university, to which he nevertheless clung by divine rightin an intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left any, includesome satires that may be published without too destructive results fifty yearshence. He was, I believe, not in the least an ill-natured man: very much theopposite, I should say; but he would not suffer fools gladly. Those who knewhim will recognize in my third act the allusion to the patent Shorthand inwhich he used to write postcards, and which may be acquired from afour-and-six-penny manual published by the Clarendon Press. The postcards whichMrs. Higgins describes are such as I have received from Sweet. I would deciphera sound which a cockney would represent by zerr, and a Frenchman by seu, andthen write demanding with some heat what on earth it meant. Sweet, withboundless contempt for my stupidity, would reply that it not only meant butobviously was the word Result, as no other Word containing that sound, andcapable of making sense with the context, existed in any language spoken onearth. That less-expert mortals should require fuller indications was beyondSweet’s patience. Therefore, though the whole point of his ‘Current Shorthand’is that it can express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as well asconsonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy andcurrent ones with which you write m, n and u, l, p and q, scribbling them atwhatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make thisremarkable and quite legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in hisown practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was theprovision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but ill-dressedlanguage; but he was led past that by his contempt for the popular Pitmansystem of Shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitmanwas a triumph of business organization: there was a weekly paper to persuadeyou to learn Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books andtranscripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where experienced teacherscoached you up to the necessary proficiency. Sweet could not organize hismarket in that fashion. He might as well have been the Sybil who tore up theleaves of prophecy that nobody would attend to. The four-and-six-penny manual,mostly in his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized, mayperhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon the public as TheTimes pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but until then it will certainly notprevail against Pitman. I have bought three copies of it during my lifetime;and I am informed by the publishers that its cloistered existence is still asteady and healthy one. I actually learned the system too several times; andyet the shorthand in which I am writing these lines is Pitman’s. And the reasonis, that my secretary cannot transcribe Sweet, having been perforce taught inthe schools of Pitman. Therefore, Sweet railed at Pitman as vainly as Thersitesrailed at Ajax: his raillery, however it may have eased his soul, gave nopopular vogue to Current Shorthand. Pygmalion Higgins is not a portrait ofSweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible;still, as will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in the play. With Higgins’sphysique and temperament, Sweet might have set the Thames on fire. As it was,he impressed himself professionally on Europe to an extent that made hiscomparative personal obscurity, and the failure of Oxford to do justice to hiseminence, a puzzle to foreign specialists in his subject. I do not blameOxford, because I think Oxford is quite right in demanding a certain socialamenity from its nurslings (heaven knows it is not exorbitant in itsrequirements!); for although I well know how hard it is for a man of geniuswith a seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly relationswith the men who underrate it, and who keep all the best places for lessimportant subjects which they profess without originality and sometimes withoutmuch capacity for them, still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, hecannot expect them to heap honors on him. Of the later generations of phoneticians I know little.Among them towers the Poet Laureate, to whom perhaps Higgins may owe hisMiltonic sympathies, though here again I must disclaim all portraiture. But ifthe play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians, andthat they are among the most important people in England at present, it willserve its turn. I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successfulplay all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intenselyand deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delightin throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that artshould never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should neverbe anything else. Finally, and for the encouragement of people troubled withaccents that cut them off from all high employment, I may add that the changewrought by Professor Higgins in the flower girl is neither impossible noruncommon. The modern concierge’s daughter who fulfils her ambition by playingthe Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas at the Theatre Francais is only one of manythousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects andacquired a new tongue. But the thing has to be done scientifically, or the laststate of the aspirant may be worse than the first. An honest and natural slumdialect is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically untaught person toimitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club; and I am sorry to say that inspite of the efforts of our Academy of Dramatic Art, there is still too muchsham golfing English on our stage, and too little of the noble English ofForbes Robertson.