Tuesdays with Morrie is a compact play for two men based on Morrie Albom's best-selling book about conversations with his old college professor, Morrie Schwartz. Morrie (Graham Robertson) is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the wasting affliction that killed American baseball player Lou Gehrig, but he has not lost the capacity to challenge and teach. Mitch (Dave Evans) has a frenetically busy career in sports journalism but is drawn back after 16 years to his old teacher and settles into a routine of regular Tuesday visits.

How Mitch learns to be less driven by his cellphone (an impossibly large and blocky 1990s artifact) and more attuned to the important things in life gives the play a major part of its drive.

Liz Bradley's capable direction keeps the piece appropriately simple and direct, supporting strong performances from Evans and Robertson. The American accents wobble a bit but the story draws us in.

Evans' Mitch has an easy way with the narrative as his character talks to the audience about Morrie and the rekindling of the relationship which revitalises Mitch's life as Morrie's life declines.

Robertson shines as the old teacher. There's glimpses of him in flashback throwing out sharp challenges to a young and gauche Mitch, who initially intends to drop his class but ends up returning for course after course. Robertson makes us see why. Morrie is tenacious and not at all put off by Mitch's surface indifference, drawing him in with questions, with Yiddish quotation and with a surprisingly dry humour that diverts sentimentality.

That 16 years pass before they see each other again despite Mitch's promise to keep in touch, is really about Mitch's drive for material success at the expense of what matters.

Morrie's physical decline is movingly done. The disease cruelly leaves him mentally able but increasingly unable to do anything for himself. (Does he wear a Dalek T shirt to symbolise an increasing dependence on the walker and the wheelchair?) Mitch's Tuesday visits to a man who is finally simply no more than a face surrounded by the white linen of his bed put him in touch with the realities of life and death as Morrie does his last bit of teaching.

All of this happens in 90 minutes or so in a sparely furnished black-curtained space (designer Brian Sudding) with appropriately selective lighting by Andrew Snell. It's not necessarily a deeply complex piece but it will resonate with anyone who has ever had to do with what happens at the ending of a life. This production (and Robertson's performance in particular) explores Morrie and Mitch's story with truth and feeling.