Jason, Lansbury, Everett, Piper to Star in West End PYGMALION?

According to a report by Baz Bamigboye for UK Daily Mail, David Jason is in talks to join Angela Lansbury, Rupert Everett and Billie Piper in an upcoming West End run of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion.

None of the actors have been confirmed for the production, however if it all works out, Jason would star as Alfred P. Doolittle, with Lansbury as Mrs. Higgins. Piper would star as Eliza Doolittle opposite Everett as Henry Higgins. Everett would be the only transfer from the Philip Prowes's Chichester Festival Theatre production of the show.

 An insider told Bamigboye of Jason's possible return to the stage: 'He has said never, never, never - but he might say yes to this. But don't bet The Farm!'

Pygmalion is a play by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's gArden Party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a comment on women's independence, packaged as a romantic comedy.

The Pygmalion myth was a popular subject for Victorian era English playwrights, including one of Shaw's influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story in 1871, called Pygmalion and Galatea. Shaw also would have been familiar with the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed.

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