JUST before Pygmalion’s opening night at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London, in April 1914, George Bernard Shaw sent Winston Churchill, with whom he enjoyed a jousting acquaintance, two tickets and a note which read: ‘Bring a friend—if you have one.’ Churchill swiftly returned the tickets, with the rejoinder: ‘I deeply regret that I am unable to attend the first performance of Pygmalion, but I will gladly attend the second—if you have one.’
In the event, the play, which had already undergone its world premiere in a German translation in Vienna the previous
