A revival of The Doctor’s Dilemma exactly 70 years ago enjoyed the longest West End run, to that date, of any George Bernard Shaw play. Odd then, perhaps, that this 1906 hatchet job on the medical profession should have been seen so comparatively infrequently since. We were reminded of the play’s many excellencies — chief among them the way it treats serious matters of life and death in a witty and entertaining way — by an Almeida production that toured to Oxford Playhouse in 1998; now the National Theatre is delighting audiences at its Lyttelton Theatre with a flawless staging, under director Nadia Fall.

The polished tone is set even before a word is spoken in Peter McKintosh’s set, which presents with remarkable verisimilitude the Harley Street consulting rooms — all leather and shining hardwoods — of a prosperous doctor. This is Colenso Ridgeon (Aden Gillett), who has been appointed that very day to the rank of knight for his contribution (as we are later to learn) to the fight against tuberculosis. Sir Colenso he now may be, but the bachelor medico clearly remains putty in the hands of fussing housekeeper Emmy (Maggie McCarthy) His elevation serves as a neat device for the introduction, one by one, of a group of his medical peers who arrive to offer their congratulations, exhibiting as they do so a range of personal foibles designed to entertain. First comes affluent, now retired, general practitioner Dr Leo Schutzmacher (Paul Herzberg) whose fortune has been made through a mendacious boast to prosperous patients: “Cure Guaranteed”.

Crusty Sir Patrick Cullen (David Calder), the next arrival, is representative of an older generation of doctors. His contempt for modern methods extends especially to those of fashionable surgeon Mr Cutler Walpole (the splendidly, not to say Shavianly, bearded Robert Portal), whose comic characteristic is the belief that all medical problems stem from blood-poisoning which is curable by the removal of the ‘nuciform sac’ (an organ of his/ Shaw’s invention).

Finally, come the contrasting figures of Dr Ralph Bloomfield Bonington (Malcolm Sinclair) and Dr Blenkinsop (Derek Hutchinson), the first a well-heeled attendant on the Royal Family, the second so poor he can barely clothe himself.

Through all of these introductions we hear from Emmy, and later from some of the medicos, who are rapt in admiration, of the presence in the waiting room of a young woman eager for Sir Colenso’s services.

At the housekeeper’s insistence the lovely Jennifer Dubedat (Genevieve O’Reilly) is eventually admitted to plead for her sick husband’s chance of life through a tuberculosis treatment being pioneered by the doctor.

With places on this trial strictly limited to ten, the talented but raffish painter Louis Dubedat (Tom Burke) must be weighed up for inclusion against those already accommodated. In effect, is his life worth more than theirs? The dilemma of the title presents itself directly when another candidate for the supposed cure emerges.

That Sir Colenso comes to entertain romantic ideas concerning Jennifer provides another element to this gripping drama, in which laughter and tears are balanced very evenly.

Performances continue until September 12. Tickets 020 7452 3000 (www.nationaltheatre.org.uk).