The First Night of Pygmalion is a 1972 play by Richard Huggett

Richard Huggett (playwright)

Richard Huggett is a playwright.Possibly his best known play is The First Night of Pygmalion.-External links:*...

. It depicts backstage events during the first British production of George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...

's play Pygmalion

Pygmalion (play)

Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts 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...

.

It depicts the backstage tensions between Shaw, Mrs Patrick Campbell

Mrs Patrick Campbell

Mrs Patrick Campbell was a British stage actress.-Early life and marriages:Campbell was born Beatrice Stella Tanner in Kensington, London, to John Tanner and Maria Luigia Giovanna, daughter of Count Angelo Romanini...

 who played Eliza Doolitle, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree

Herbert Beerbohm Tree

Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was an English actor and theatre manager.Tree began performing in the 1870s. By 1887, he was managing the Haymarket Theatre, winning praise for adventurous programming and lavish productions, and starring in many of its productions. In 1899, he helped fund the...

who played Professor Higgins, including the controversy surrounding the line "not bloody likely". It is mainly based on letters, diaries and newspaper reports from the time. A version has been shown on British television.