Witnessing the stubbornly loving interplay between Jim Mezon as Henry Higgins and Tara Rosling as Eliza Doolittle makes one’s heart blissful that classic theatre has returned for the summer.

And when you see what director Jackie Maxwell has done to capture the essence of playwright Bernard Shaw’s witty and wry omni-layered drama, you’ll marvel at the polished staging of it all while posing the question: Why can’t all plays be like this?

Dialogue within Pygmalion, which pivots itself around a two bachelor, one-woman triangle, is adamantine ear glue. This is largely credited to Shaw’s fascination with social class and unwillingness to allow a single line to enter his script that won’t further the story.

At the crux of the story is an experiment of facetious phonetics that goes so right that everything ends up wrong. Henry Higgins and his cohort, Pickering (Lorne Kennedy), go to great lengths to transform Eliza, the “plain little gutter snipe” who sells flowers in the market, by softening the vowels and hardening the consonants of her Cockney accent. If Eliza can adopt the speech and mannerisms of a duchess and delude the upper class of society, it’ll go down as a feat of unimaginable ascendancy.

“Do any of us understand what we’re doing? If we did, would we do it,” asks the ultra insensitive Higgins in response to Eliza’s decision to go ahead with the linguistic makeover.

Six months go by and it’s time for Eliza’s coming out party, an alpha test of sorts. It’s only now does the audience realizes that you can take the girl out of the market but you can’t take the market out of the girl.

When the jig is up, she is heartbroken to learn that her fate is to return to her point of origin. However, this time around she sees the world with new eyes.

“The difference between a lady and a flower girl isn’t how she behaves but how she is treated,” laments Eliza deeply offended by the realizations he was merely an object of examination.

As Henry Higgins, Jim Mezon validates why he is the alpha and omega of stage talent. He buoyantly redefines what it means to be aloof as the nutty professor whose cruel-to-be-kind methodology raises the eyebrows of many a theatergoer.

What a leap of faith for Tara Rosling who lands her first major role in just her second season at the Shaw Festival. You knew she had the talent to get this far but cultivating that natural inventiveness for acting was another hurdle. Under the watchful eye of the director, she’s made Eliza Doolittle the fragile dreamer the playwright would have envisioned the role to be played.

So how exactly has Jackie Maxwell been able to buff this Bernard Shaw gem to look like such a glittering prize? For starters, she directs a capable, briskly paced production with the highest of standards. And then she touches up the softer scenes like the one with Eliza getting her first hot bath with a glorious silhouette high above the set.

Pygmalion is a timeless class-conscious drama with a heap of laughs. Bernard Shaw’s intricately balanced view of social ethos and class ambidexterity is the level of noble architecture that helps us to appreciate that little in life, if anything, is truly cut and dry.