The play opens one rainy night in Covent Garden. Theater-goers take shelter from the downpour in the porch of St Paul's. A poor flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, plies her wares. In the shadow of one of the pillars, a mysterious man is making notes of verything she and everyone else says. He begins amusing the small crowd by accurately deducting where each speaker comes from, based on the way he or she speaks. An elderly gentleman is most intrigued by this and introduces himself as Colonel Pickering of the Indian Army and an expert on dialects. The note taker is Professor Henry Higgins, a scholar of phonetics. Higgins is a braggart and boasts of his being able to use the science of phonetics to making any flower girl sound like a Duchess! Colonel Pickering immediately takes up the challenge.Written specially for Mrs. Patrick Campbell, whom Shaw was supposed to have been deeply in love with, the role of Eliza is of a girl full of high spirits, street smartness and innocence. Higgins is sarcastic, witty, impatient, arrogant and obnoxious, but he is also a gifted teacher. Colonel Pickering is the perfect gentleman and a foil to the Professor's rudeness. In all, a delightful comedy that has not lost a bit of its shine more than a century after it was first written!
