George Bernard Shaw's Birthplace

Let’s face it, it’s a great film, and Audrey Hepburn is brilliant as flower seller Eliza Doolittle. But while the cast was belting out “I could have danced all night” and “I’m getting married in the morning” Shaw would have been spinning like a top in his grave.

The prolific writer was born in Dublin in Synge Street, in an area of the city known as Portobello. He penned more than 60 plays in his lifetime along with countless articles and pamphlets and speeches to promote his favoured socialist causes. Although his best-known works were his plays, which gained their popularity through the humour they contained, Shaw was every inch the serious writer. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 and became the only person in history to scoop an Oscar as well for his work on the film adaptation of his play Pygmalion.

The things is though, Shaw hated musical versions of his work and shied away from them after his play Arms and the Man was turned into an operetta called The Chocolate Soldier. Shaw agreed reluctantly but insisted all the characters’ names were altered and that all his dialogue be changed too. He hated the finished work, and although it was very successful, he had declined all royalties, which were considerable. From then on Shaw refused to let anyone else put his work to music. Consequently, none of the others was given the treatment until after he died and couldn’t object. With him out of the way it was a free for all! Pygmalion got ‘musicalised’ and became My Fair Lady and was a massive hit both on stage and especially on the screen, when it was given the Hollywood treatment by Warner Brothers.

The $17million budget would also have sat very uneasily with ardent left-winger who was born at 33 Synge Street in 1856. He lived there with his parents and two sisters and attended Wesley College and Dublin’s Central Model School and the English Scientific and Commercial Day School. His singing mum ran away with her voice teacher when he was 16 and his sisters went with her but he remained in Dublin with his father and worked as a clerk until, aged 20, he moved to live with his mother in London. Subsidised by his mum and sister, he spent his days writing and the rest, as they say, is history. 

His birthplace and childhood home has been restored to its Victorian appearance and bedrooms, kitchen, nursery, and parlour are all furnished and styled according to the period. The house was opened for the public in 1993 and includes a bookshop.

The house is quite tricky to visit, as it is not open much or that often. It’s closed from September to May and on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. But on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from May to the end of August you’re laughing!

Admission is €6 for adults and €5 for concessions and €4 for children under 12. Synge Street is only a 10-minute walk from St Stephen’s Green or you can reach it on bus numbers 16, 16A, 19, 19A and 122.