PYGMALION

In the organizer's words:

PYGMALION

by Amir Reza Koohestani and Mahin Sadri based on the comedy of the same name by George Bernard Shaw

translated from the Persian by Sima Djabar Zadegan

You are how you speak. Phonetics professor Higgins bets his friend Pickering that he can turn the energetic Eliza Doolittle, who struggles to make ends meet by selling flowers on the street and speaks only the broadest dialect, into a perfectly articulate upper-class lady in the shortest possible time. Eliza proves to be a disciplined and talented pupil and makes her first appearances in high society. Higgins attributes his success to his genius and reflexively lays claim to it. It is beyond his perception that Eliza develops into a self-confident and reflective woman who not only knows how to make her own decisions, but also how to implement them.

George Bernard Shaw created his best-known female character in his adaptation of Ovid's myth Pygmalion - which is also an important motif in Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale". Even though she is the heroine of a comedy with the subtitle "A Romance", she stands in particular for the political ideals of the author, who as a committed socialist advocated the emancipation of women and universal suffrage.

After Shaw's death, the musical "My Fair Lady" was created based on his play, which takes a less harsh look at issues of gender and class injustice, but made him world-famous. As with "Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy", "Prima Facie" and "The Copenhagen Trilogy", "Pygmalion" is about female empowerment in a male-dominated society.

The Iranian director Amir Reza Koohestani has also been known in Europe for many years for his finely conceived rewrites of well-known material. Together with Iranian playwright Mahin Sadri, he questions Shaw's comedy, which premiered at Vienna's Burgtheater in 1913, with regard to today's discourse on classism:

"Eliza is a working-class woman who doesn't belong anywhere: neither with her father, who drinks and has no interest in her, nor with the professor, who abuses her for his vanity. The struggle to define her own self, her own identity, is at the heart of our approach to Shaw's play." Amir Reza Koohestani and Mahin Sadri

Price information:

from 10€ for students