Pygmalion in Rehearsal, 3/5 – “King Enough For Me” – Part 2

That the horrific, hateful violence against Suffragette women on 1910’s famed Black Friday was a mere two years before Shaw wrote such an overtly feminist play, or that the sinking of the Titanic occurred in April 1912, in the midst of his playwriting – a disaster in which the literal segregation of social classes caused 76% of Third Class passengers including 49 children from Steerage to perish compared to only 49% of First Class passengers including 1 First Class child, surely cannot have gone unnoticed, nor been uninfluential, however slightly, in forming some element of the play’s bellowing cry for socialism and classless society.

Amongst the most compelling examples of Shaw’s progressive thought in the play comes towards the end of Act IV, before the blisteringly feminist tour-de-force of Act V (but that’s a story for another blog). Shaw’s tale finds Eliza, at last sick to the back teeth, and fled out onto the streets from the blinkered tyranny of Higgins, catching Freddy Eysnford-Hill in the act of lovelorn loitering outside her home, having madly loved her from afar since the opening moments of Act I. Within moments, Freddy betrays his feelings, and with Eliza realising she feels the same way, the two are caught up in an endearingly comical spectacle of avoiding the watchful eyes of a patrolling police officer whilst completely unable to keep their hands off of each other.

Left: Freddy Eysnford-Hill loiters outside Eliza's home, stalked by a Bobby on the beat.

As we blocked the scene, we became more and more keenly aware that for all of the scene’s comedy, Shaw masterfully underscores the couple’s conference with a genuine dramatic tension and an emotional resonance. One need not reminisce about the all-too-recent Black Friday of the Suffragettes to know that no police officer would be too kind, to say the least, to any woman thought to be stirring up trouble on the streets, certainly not one caught in flagrante delicto in the dead of night with a middle-class young man in Edwardian England. Eliza herself, with her panicked cries of “They’ll take away my character and drive me onto the streets for speaking to gentlemen!” to Higgins’ suspected plain clothes officer in Act I, alludes to the reality of Edwardian women living in fear of the police, and of the ruination wrought by any accusations of public indecency levelled at them in a deeply sexist society.

The two are caught multiple times, and yet, Freddy nobly leaps to Eliza’s defence and gives her a perfect alibi that the two are engaged so that before either of them knows it, they are away in a taxi making plans to be married, and for Eliza to forever escape Higgins’ vile clutches and find safety with Freddy. His own male presence in Eliza’s life is consistently a stark contrast with Higgins, countering the master phonetics professor’s cold, sneering, cruel and abusive treatment with a sincere, heartfelt love and affection for Eliza precisely as he first saw her, which endures long after Higgins has twisted her into something she is not.

"I spend most of my nights here. It's the only place where I'm happy."

Most interestingly, Shaw calls Pygmalion A Romance in Five Acts, and yet Freddy’s character, and the relationship he and Eliza share, is a significant departure from the socio-cultural ideal of Edwardian masculinity that typically informs such contemporary romantic tales – Edwardian Masculinity itself still strongly resembling, as it did, the ideals of Victorian masculinity and its associated movement for Muscular Christianity that followed a cultural shift in the collective notion of manliness from spirituality and earnestness between 1837 and 1870, towards one of strength, stoicism, and emotional suppression which laid the foundations of what we now recognise as the culture of toxic masculinity that is killing men in staggeringly high numbers today.

Continued in Part 3