While many of us associate George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” almost exclusively with the successful musical “My Fair Lady,” which was based on it, the play was a critical and popular success when it debuted in 1916. An excellent production of this scathing satire, coupled with fine acting and a gorgeous set, has recently been brought to Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater. Despite its veneer of quaint English living-room humour, “Pygmalion” strikes a chord with many of us by tackling the ‘Holy Macalester Trinity’ of race, class and gender.

Eccentric linguist Henry Higgins (Daniel Gerroll) takes in Eliza Doolittle (Bianca Amato), a Cockney flower-vendor, as part of a bet to pass her off as a lady of high birth, complete with patrician parlance. No one anticipates the results of the experiment. Not only does Eliza successfully pull off the stunt and charm the pants off London high society, including Higgins’ ridiculously-clad Hungarian rival Nepommuck (Bob Davis), but both Higgins and young aristocrat Freddy Eynsford Hill (Robert Berdahl) find themselves falling in love with her.

Both Gerroll and Amato manage to successfully capture the ambivalence and complexities of their romantic relationship and power struggle. Gerroll, in fact, offers a more temperamental, energetic and convincing Higgins than the dry-witted Rex Harrison did in the film version. His character is deliciously hypocritical: although he chastises Eliza for her lack of personal hygiene and linguistic abilities, his own personal habits are far from impeccable and his language is a smattering of Victorian expletives: “damn,” “what the devil” and the mysterious “word that begins with the same letter as bath” (bloody? bugger? blast?). He bullies Eliza mercilessly, but at the same time cannot stand up to the daunting pillars of proto-femlib that are his housekeeper Mrs. Pearce (Barbara Bryne) and his sagacious and stylish mother (Patricia Conolly).

Amato’s performance, while not as outstanding as Gerroll’s, or even Audrey Hepburn’s turn in “My Fair Lady,” manages to live up to the comedic and dramatic potential that the role of Eliza has to offer. Although the characters of Eliza and Higgins dominate the performance, it is the supporting acting that is often more memorable: Bryne and Brian Reddy, as Eliza’s drunk dustman father Alfred, combine for a handful of stage-stealing monologues.

While Shaw subtitled this play as “A Romance in Five Acts,” it is more often the un-romantic subplots that allow him to unleash his social criticism to its fullest extent. Alfred Doolittle’s diatribe against “middle-class morality” and Eliza’s dilemma as to what to do with her new-found societal status cut to the heart of Shaw’s critique.

Although cerebral, “Pygmalion” is not lacking in simpler forms of humour. In Eliza’s first venture into polite company, she comes off as an automaton relegated to a handful of standard phrases and topics: the weather, people’s health and “how do you do?” Although she passes off the accent successfully, the conversation descends into the crude and comic. When the topic moves to her late aunt, she declares, “I think they done the old lady in,” with her recently-acquired regal nonchalance.

When the play first opened, much of the humor lay in the novelty of Cockney accents on a West End stage. While that may be lost on a modern audience, the play makes up for it with typically English charm—the sort of thing that would appeal to fans of “Pride and Prejudice” and Hugh Grant—that does not take away from its gravity. However you look at it, “Pygmalion” has cemented its place as a classic of its genre, and remains enjoyable, even without Audrey Hepburn’s lip-synched rendition of “Wouldn’t it be loverly.”