In Bernard Shaw's play, a brilliantly written reworking of the classical myth, a phonetics professor bets that he can teach a Cockney flower girl to pass as a duchess in three months. A barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw's feminist views, the plays ends with Eliza becoming an independent woman, able to hold her own in a battle of words with the professor Higgins. Those audiences only familiar with the story from the musical, My Fair Lady, will find a very different ending in Shaw's "romance in five acts". Shaw's Eliza will not be fetching any slippers in her future.
