But what about Henry Higgins's father? This gentleman - as we must presume him to be - goes unmentioned in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, which seems rather curious in a play so concerned with background as an influence on a person's conduct. We clearly see what has turned Eliza Doolittle into the "baggage" and "guttersnipe" - "so deliciously low, so horribly dirty" - that Higgins considers her to be. By contrast, however, we learn nothing of what has fashioned him into an odious bully unashamed to employ such epithets.

"Oh, men! men!! men!!!" says his mother despairingly, at the end of Act III. Brilliantly portrayed by Barbara Jefford in Peter Hall's fine production, Mrs Higgins is a woman who has evidently suffered much from this sex in the past. This no doubt helps explain her tenderness towards Covent Garden flower girl Eliza, whom she correctly sees, from the outset, as the victim of her son's selfish experiment in changing not just an accent but a life. Clearly she has been the dominant presence during Henry's upbringing. A baleful influence? A psychiatrist might think so, and members of a modern audience are bound to exchange knowing looks when he tells her: "My idea of a loveable woman is something as like you as possible."

But being good to his mum does not mean being more than just good friends with his fellow speech expert Col Pickering, as this faithful and very handsome production - scenery, Simon Higlett; costumes Christopher Woods - makes clear. Odd though it may appear today, their relationship is in the Sherlock Holmes/Dr Watson tradition and their cohabiting in Wimpole Street no more than a matter of domestic convenience. Pickering - presented with considerable embonpoint by Barry Stanton - clearly enjoys his creature comforts, which loyal housekeeper Mrs Pearce (Una Stubbs) presumably supplies plenteously.

Tim Pigott-Smith provides a most convincing, if necessarily shocking, portrait of the intellectually focused cold-fish Higgins, who was based (in professional terms at least) on the Oxford phonetician and philologist Henry Sweet. As Eliza, Michelle Dockery effects an impressive transformation from cocky cockney to dodgy 'duchess', breaking all hearts when we come to share her realisation that her transformation has left her with no spiritual 'home'. Happily (if unbelievably fortuitously), her upward mobility has been matched by a sudden improvement in fortune for her dustman dad - a great comic role seized with gusto by Tony Haygarth, though his quickfire delivery of the lines means that some of the funniest are missed.

Sir Peter properly gives us Shaw's original ending in which master and pupil appear to be deprived of future domestic happiness together. Mr Pigott-Smith's look of abject misery as the curtain descends, however, hardly squares with the playwright's stage direction instructing that Higgins should "disport himself in a highly self-satisfied manner".