Producer Bill Kenwright’s top-class revival of Clifford Odets’s The Country Girl, starring Martin Shaw and Jenny Seagrove, is at Milton Keynes this week on its way to a West End run.

It moves into the Apollo Theatre in October in succession to the highly acclaimed production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons with David Suchet and Zoë Wanamaker.

Another startlingly good version of an American stage classic, then, focusing once more on a troubled marriage and again featuring high-profile actors who are as at home on the stage as the screen.

Well, perhaps not quite as at home so far in the case of Shaw and Seagrove, who both need to enunciate more clearly if the scope and subtlety of the play are to be fully appreciated. First seen in Britain as Winter Journey and well-known in the Oscar-winning film version with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, The Country Girl is the quintessential play about putting on a play, complete with lessons on the techniques of acting from a writer who helped lay the groundwork for the ‘method’ school.

Its focus is a middle-aged former star Frank Elgin (Shaw) who has lost his skills, as he thinks, to stage fright and drink, and his fortune to unwise investment in other people’s lousy plays. Young director Bernie Dodd (the superb Mark Letheren) lures him out of a self-imposed retirement — against the wishes of a tough-cookie financial backer (Nicholas Day) — convinced he can give a commanding performance that will set the seal on his own directorial career.

The success, the intense drama, of the scenes between the two — with the assertive younger man eagerly admiring and seeking to nurture a talent the older doubts he still possesses — can hardly be exaggerated. This perhaps owes something to the fact that Shaw himself played the tyro director nearly 30 years ago, when Bill Kenwright’s production of the play became the first of his many West End hits.

Dodd wrongly assumes at first that Elgin’s problems have been exacerbated, even created, by his wife Georgie (Seagrove), the country girl of the title. His mistake is revealed during a wonderfully scripted scene, in the course of which Dodd himself comes to recognise the resilience and resourcefulness of a quite remarkable woman.

Other winning contributions come from Peter Harding as the good-sort company manager Larry, Luke Shaw as the eager, aunt-harried playwright Paul Unger, and Thomasin Rand as the young star of the play-within-a-play who is to feel, all too painfully, the admonitions of Elgin’s fierce grandfather character when she rashly chooses an unsuitable suitor.

The action speeds along under director Rufus Norris, with the behind-the-scenes atmosphere of a 1950s theatre nicely caught in Scott Pask’s flexible designs.

Until Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 7652 (www.ambassadortickets.com/miltonkeynes).