Everybody liked Peter Hall's revival of Pygmalion at Bath last summer, and everybody should still like it now that it has made a belated transfer to London, perhaps even the more so because it comes without Professor Higgins singing a sentimental ditty about Eliza's face and her dustman father coming out with a jolly tootle about getting married. Here's the play that Shaw actually wrote, and wrote with a serious purpose: to show not merely that fine ladies are just flower girls with classy accents and manners, but that to transform a flower girl into a fine lady may be to wrong her, fine ladies being less useful and employable than flower girls.

These ideas obviously have less punch now than they did in 1914, when Pygmalion was the toast and scandal of London, but maybe it has some point in the era of the It girl, the trophy wife, the WAG and the airhead celeb. In any case, it adds texture to a production that remains pretty irresistible, thanks largely to Michelle Dockery.

Her Eliza may be barely more plausible than Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady when she emits fake-Cockney yells of “aaaaghwooagh”, but from the first she has the embryonic strength, dignity, defiance, delicacy and sweetness to explain why she will triumph at a posh party and then tell her Pygmalion, the bully Higgins, where he can put himself and his phonetics apparatus.

The play's main irony, which is that the upper-class Higgins rates far below the prole Eliza in both sensitivity and etiquette departments, is evident from the start, at times almost too much so. I hesitate to criticise the wonderfully watchable Tim Pigott-Smith, but he does lay on the infantilism a bit thick.

I'm glad that he doesn't emulate Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, who was too self-infatuated to dare to be boorish; but this Higgins might never have left the nursery, so rudely does he blunder about, slumping here, slouching there, blowing his nose on his tie, playing a gleeful game of patacake with James Laurenson's Colonel Pickering, indulging in what used to be called pocket billiards, and nervously shying away when he senses Eliza's sexual force-field.

I'm not sure that Hall's final suggestion, which is that Higgins's seemingly reproachful mother is secretly babying and therefore encouraging his immaturity, has a Shavian justification; but that didn't prevent me appreciating Barbara Jefford, who brings an exhausted tolerance to the role. She also presides as world-wearily as you'd wish over the great afternoon-tea scene. Looking exquisite, Dockery's Eliza says all the wrong things in exactly the right voice. Looking like a triumphant chimp, Pigott-Smith sprawls, munches, listens. And did I laugh? Indeed I did.

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