What wonderful people they were, Bernard Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell, separately and together! It is together we have them in Dear Liar, Jerome Kilty’s play-recital, with Robert Hardy and Sian Phillips. Shaw blazed away in his writing genius, Mrs Pat in her acting greatness. Together they made another fine glow, with their fun and frolic understanding, friction, and moving human love. Kilty weaves his story from the Shaw-Campbell correspondence adroitly and clearly, with the letter extracts being garnished with little bits of play and play-acting.

The letters start in 1900 and end in 1939, and in them is mirrored a lot of Shaw’s work and private personality and Mrs Pat’s long travail with her wayward temperament and gradually wasted talent. Both write vividly, wittily, with striking depth and feeling and intellectual forcefulness. Shaw’s account of his mother’s cremation at Golders Green is deeply moving , and arresting in its sense and sensibility . We have the time of rehearsal and production of Pygmalion, when Mrs Pat made yet another hit, as Eliza; Mrs Pat declining in Hollywood, as acid and self-destructive as ever; Shaw growing old (though he would live for more than a decade), and Mrs Pat’s death, lonely and virtually forgotten in Pau in 1939. How the letters came to be preserved and arranged for publication is a drama in itself.

Robert Hardy is lively, sparkling, though sometimes too animated and sharp in speech (Shaw’s Irish brogue was soft and low, though absolutely clear). Sian Phillips has dignity as well as pathos as Mrs Pat, and her evocation of life-in-letters is particularly effective. Frith Banbury directed.