Can it really be – in the 21st century – that the working classes have to affect an accent to succeed?

Yes, believes Ringmer-born playwright and director David Grindley.

He has a personal example to highlight why themes from George Bernard Shaw’s 100-year-old play Pygmalion are still relevant.

Grindley, directing a new production of the play starring Alistair McGowan, Rula Lenska, Jamie Foreman and Rachel Barry, remembers the wedding of a friend who married a well- spoken man from Essex.

“We went to the wedding and his the family were from Essex and were speaking Cockney geezer estuary English,” he explains.

“He’d obviously made the choice to speak differently in order to move in a different social set in university and beyond.

“That choice was very shrewd. He is now a successful man.”

Shaw’s play, later used as the basis for hit musical My Fair Lady, charts phonetics professor Henry Higgins’ attempt to turn florist Eliza Doolittle into a duchess by changing her speech and behaviour.

Higgins sees people judge others by the way they speak. If he can make Doolittle speak and act “correctly”, then people will assume she is from a different background.

“The argument is about all human beings being equal, how we have, by certain arbitrary things like the way we speak, decided to categorise people.

“That is what makes it continually relevant. People aren’t born of any less worth because they are born working class or because they have more money and are upper class.

“We make these judgements about each other and it is worth challenging.”

Grindley, a former pupil at Lewes Priory School and Eastbourne College, decided he wanted to be a playwright after watching luminaries such as Peter O’Toole on stage at Theatre Royal Brighton.

Since leaving the area to study at York University, he has travelled the world writing and directing theatre.

He won a Tony Award in 2007 for his production of Journey’s End, but a Pygmalion production he directed in New York that same year got a kicking in the reviews.

He says this new production feels like a case of unfinished business and he believes his new leading man, Alistair McGowan, will be able to get across what failed the first time in America.

“Higgins is a man child. He is obsessed with work. He behaves badly at the exclusion of all else because he is not aware he is doing it as he is so fixated on his work.

“Higgins meets Eliza and transforms her but equally he undergoes his own transformation, where he discovers feeling. He realises he feels for Eliza not just as a professor and student but as a fellow human being.

“In New York we never quite got across that element of the discovery of an emotional life.”

Alistair McGowan manages to portray that transformation, says Grindley.

“You have the master of voices playing the professor of voices.”

Not that he overdoes the impersonations.

“Everything is in character. Of course, when he does an impersonation of Higgins doing an impersonation it’s perfect.”

Most of the impressions happened in the rehearsal room. And while Grindley is speaking to The Guide, he’s not in on the action.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s not entertaining the cast with a dab hand version of me right now.”