MOVE over Mr Caine! The director of the Haymarket Theatre in Basingstoke, Alasdair Ramsay, handles Willy Russell's alcoholic professor just as well as Michael Caine in the acclaimed film version of Educating Rita - he's just a bit more homespun.
"Criticism is purely objective - no room for sentimentality" according to the rather jaundiced Professor Frank. In that case, the Haymarket's production, directed by Kate Dove, is "dead good" in straightforward scouse parlance.
In fact there's nothing dead about this two-hander; script, production and players are brimming with vitality.
Liverpudlian Russell's Educating Rita, as with his other masterpieces, deals with class and cultural divide (Blood Brothers) and a search for freedom of choice (Shirley Valentine).
It is slightly autobiographical in that like his creation Rita, he left school at 15 and worked in a ladies' hairdressers - the Sweeney Todd of Kirby.
Diminutive actress Melanie Revill has all the necessary zest to steer the Rita character away from streetwise ignorance through shallow knowledge to land in the safe haven of worldly wisdom.
Throughout the play she holds on to that cocky physical and mental restlessness which contrasts so sharply with Frank's static life in a stolid safe academia.
Bottles of whisky hidden behind the literary tomes in his study are his antidote to boredom and disillusionment.
Alasdair Ramsay having spent so much of the last 20 years pushing actors around, finally decided it was time to remember how frightening it was to be in front of an audience again.
If he did have any stage nerves they didn't show and if his cool and masterly handling of the Rita's cynical tutor is anything to go by, its a pity he didn't return to the stage earlier.
Together Ramsay and Revill manage to generate the necessary rapport, never missing a chance to emphasise the wit, humour and pathos in Russell's superb script. It conjures up such a vivid picture of the other personalities in the lives of Rita and Frank - Rita's boring husband, flatmate Trish and Frank's live-in lover, Julia.
Rita's thirst for knowledge, Frank's for whisky, with a combined interest in each other and the literary giants, drive the action along to the play's humorous conclusion when it's game, set and final cut to Rita.
Want to learn something about live theatre? Don't miss Educating Rita which continues at The Haymarket theatre in Basingstoke until tomorrow, (Saturday). Sue Cansfield