Pygmalion and Galatea, an Original Mythological Comedy is a blank verse play by W. S. Gilbert in three acts based on the Pygmalion story. It opened at the Haymarket Theatre in London on 9 December 1871 and ran for a very successful 184 performances. It was revived many times, including an 1883 production in New York starring Mary Anderson as Galatea, an 1883–84 revival at the Lyceum Theatre, again with Anderson, and an 1888 production at the Lyceum Theatre, with Julia Neilson as Cynisca. Pygmalion was Gilbert's greatest success to that date and is said to have earned him £40,000 during his lifetime. Pygmalion and Galatea was so popular that other Pygmalions were rushed to the stage. In January 1872, Ganymede and Galatea opened at the Gaiety Theatre. This was a comic version of Franz von Suppé's Die schöne Galathee, coincidentally with Arthur Sullivan's brother, Fred Sullivan, in the cast. In March 1872, William Brough'sPygmalion; or, The Statue Fair was revived, and in May of that year, a visiting French company produced Victor Massé's Galathée. Gilbert created several blank verse "fairy comedies" at the Haymarket Theatre for John Baldwin Buckstone and starring William Hunter Kendal and his wife Madge Robertson Kendal, in the early 1870s. These plays, influenced by the fairy work of James Planché, are founded upon the idea of self-revelation by characters under the influence of some magic or some supernatural interference. The first was The Palace of Truth in 1870, a fantasy adapted from a story by Madame de Genlis. Pygmalion and Galatea, a satire of sentimental, romantic attitudes toward myth, was one of seven plays that Gilbert produced in 1871. Together, these plays, and successors such as The Wicked World, Sweethearts, Charity, and Broken Hearts, did for Gilbert on the dramatic stage what the German Reed Entertainments had done for him on the musical stage. They established that his capabilities extended far beyond burlesque and won him artistic credentials as a writer of wide range, who was as comfortable with human drama as with farcical humour.
Synopsis
In Gilbert's Pygmalion story, the sculptor is a married man. He sculpts many copies in the image of wife, Cynisca. His wife at first encourages his interest in one of these statues, Galatea. Cynisca is often away, and she doesn't want her husband to be bored. When the statue comes to life, however, matters become complex, as she falls in love with her creator. Galatea is born so innocent that she appears wayward and disrupts the lives she touches during her one day in the flesh. Under the fire of Cynisca's jealousy, and seeing the difficulty in which she has placed Pygmalion, Galatea decides that her original state was happier, and turns back into a statue.
"The Cambridge History of English and American Literature" noted: A New York Times review of a production of the play at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York City said, In 2012, biologist Fred Sander used the play "as a 'hook' to explore the ethics and science of cloning" in his book Created In Our Own Images.com. Sander wrote: "Gilbert’s drama not only anticipates psychoanalysis in the 20th century, but also, written a hundred years before the discovery of stem cells, it metaphorically resonates with the 21st century of genomic medicine.... Gilbert's comedy... points to new biological, psychological, social, and ethical issues raised by the... sequencing of the genome and the explosion of stem cell research."
