It is a delight to see Willy Russell's Educating Rita on stage in its original form as a rousing piece for two actors. And in the hands of actors Francesca Bianchi and Colin Moody, the story of Rita the hairdresser who yearns for learning and Frank the gone-to-seed Open University teacher who has to take her on as a student is funny, poignant and absorbing,

It's a play often compared to George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and certainly there are parallels but Rita, in Britain in the early 1980s, eventually only toys with changing her Liverpudlian accent. She tackles her transformation via academic learning, even though it loses her her marriage and pushes her away from her working-class origins.

Frank, despite his fondness for the bottle, is enough of a teacher to be increasingly reluctant to see her lose her initial fresh perceptions of literature to the demands of writing a "lit crit" essay. But he finds it harder to handle the deeper change that eventuates in her.

Bianchi is all suitable bounce and attitude in the early scenes where Rita is floundering her way into a new world. Her tenacity is clear, as is the truth of her eventual transformation into a confident and perceptive woman who can hold her own across British class lines. At which point you can see why she might go back to her birth name of Susan.

Moody is rumpled and properly eccentric as Frank, for whom the volumes of literary classics that line his study have almost been reduced to a filing system that conceals an increasing number of whiskey bottles by the time Rita first arrives. The despair of the one-time minor poet who has given up on his own writing but who still knows a promising student when he sees one is superbly caught.

They argue, they fall out, they reconcile, they argue some more. Rita comes back from summer school and Frank sees his student ready to move on just as he himself is being shifted into antipodean exile because of his drinking.

It's marvellous stuff, a well-warranted attack on inequities of gender and class and education done through the clash of two quirky individuals. Jacob Battista's set, with its sense of a lecturer's study caught inside a large book is amusingly economical and director Denny Lawrence shapes the piece well.

Moody and Bianchi capture the tensions between Frank and Rita and the issues of the play with a melancholic humour that makes this show a real crowd pleaser. And it opens with Ferry Cross the Mersey. What more could you ask for?