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The witty and bewitching repartee of the great Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and the captivating actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell so fascinated American playwright Jerome Kilty that he turned their correspondence into a successful Broadway play. That play, called “Dear Liar,” comes to the Theatre at Washington, Va., for a staged reading on Saturday, April 26 at 8 p.m.
The climax of Shaw’s career as a writer of comedies was reached with his most famous play Pygmalion. Its transformation into the enormously successful musical My Fair Lady made the character Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower girl, known to millions throughout the world. What is not well known is that Shaw wrote the part of Eliza for Mrs. Patrick Campbell, an actress whose name remains a household phrase in Britain though not in the United States. And what is even less well known is that Mrs. Patrick Campbell was 47 at the time she brought the character to the London stage for its first performance there.
Shaw saw the Pygmalion character as a “rapscallionly flower girl.” After Shaw read the play for the first time to “Mrs. Pat” the actress wrote to him to thank him for “thinking I can be your pretty slut”
The playwright and the actress were the talk of London society. Shaw’s friend Beatrice Webb, the English social reformer, characterized the relationship as “one of gross mutual flattery, each pandering to the other’s morbid craving for the recognition of unique genius ... he is the fly and the lady the spider.”
In the staged reading of “Dear Liar” at the Theatre at Washington, Va., Ann Russell plays the part of Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Michael Joyce , the part of George Bernard Shaw.
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