Glorious John Betjeman. With every year that passes his outline fades a little more. His particular and peculiar slice of Albion disappearing into the mists.

Wonderful Betjeman, he of the wistful rhyming couplets that speak to longing and regret, the snob who skewers snobbishness, the strangulated vowels, the world of beautiful girls on bicycles, church-crawling with WH Auden, tennis on the lawn and, of course, sand in the sandwiches on those grim summer beach holidays.

Betjeman the poet laureate, the architectural champion, the boaster of a gilded circle of friends but only to express his witty astonishment at membership, so easily dismissed by the cognoscenti unable to dive beyond his shallows to the depths of his profound understanding of a passing world.

How to keep the memory of this Betjeman alive? Perhaps just to let those pristine words and poetry fill the air of a theatre.

This is the task that falls to Edward Fox in Sand in the Sandwiches, a one man show in which the veteran actor spends a faultless two hours bringing the great man's words alive.

Tall, slim craggy Fox looks very unlike bald rotund Betjeman so this is no impression, an entirely good thing as the former's immaculate delivery allows us simply to savour the words and the wit.

And what joys there are to behold. The poems are there of course, A Subaltern's Love Song (the paean to Miss J Hunter Dunn) and The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel are beautifully and flawlessly read. But it's Betjeman's priceless skills as a teller of stories that are really showcased in all their mischievous glory.

Betjemen is the wielder of the stilleto not the sabre. His wonderful take down on his parents, his father's stolid pomposity and his mother's attempt at a regal air, is so funny simply because the balloon pricking is done with affection too.

Similarly his prospective father-in-law's agonising over what he will allow the young Betjemen to call him brings forth peels of laughter from the Theatre Royal stalls.

And his joyous tale of a first job as a hapless and totally useless cricket master at a minor public school is Betjeman at his finest, witty of course, typically self-deprecating but so precisely and elegantly told. He wastes nothing.

For Fox this is some task but he rises to it. By allowing Betjeman to speak directly to us from a lost time he has made that outline just a little more clear.