Pygmalion

George Bernard Shaw’s play was a West End hit from its first performance. The story of how Henry Higgins, a Professor of Phonetics, makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to speak properly, mocks the British class system and is an early expression of women’s rights.

Best known as the musical My Fair Lady, the play has a darker side, partly inspired by a child trafficking scandal of 1885.