My Fair Lady

My Fair Lady, “the perfect musical,” as the work of composer Frederick Loew and librettist Alan Jay Lerner is often called, was based on the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. This is a well-known fact. The original comedy, with the ironic subtitle “a romantic play in five acts” by the Irish-born but, after Shakespeare, the most important English playwright, was written in 1912 and only two years later, after having appeared on stages in Vienna, Berlin and Prague, was staged in London, where its plot takes place. The play caused a stir on the stage with the previously unheard-of juicy curse “bloody arse” (“fucked ass,” in Ota Ornest’s Czech translation “rotten ass”). In the Brno version, which entered the history of Czech theatre with the epithet "from Zelňák" in 1999, the unforgettable exclamation was heard: "Suck your rotten ass!", 340 times! First at the Drama Stage and then at the Bishop's Court.