BETTY Blue Eyes was last staged in Yorkshire in June 2014 during the Alan Bennett 80th birthday season at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

It returns in 2016 in the rather more confined space of Friargate Theatre in York but well suits its new surroundings in Robert Readman's sprightly production.

Betty Blues Eyes is technically not an Alan Bennett show, instead being American duo Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman's stage adaptation of A Private Function, scripted for the screen by Bennett and film director Malcolm Mowbray.

The musical comes with typically polished and witty songs by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, who first ventured on to a farm in Honk!. Now they tread a muddy path anew to the Yorkshire farmstead of mithering, hip flask-fuelled Mr Sutcliffe (Jonny Holbek). Here, Betty, the pig with the big blue eyes, is being fattened on behalf of the town council big-wigs for a lavish private function in honour of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip's forthcoming wedding.

Trouble is, the year is 1947, and such activities are highly illegal in a post-war Britain, still under the shadow of austerity and rationing and very much under the fierce glare of fastidious, supercilious government meat inspector Mr Wormold (a splendidly mean-spirited Mark Hird).

Adam Sowter's shy, mild-mannered chiropodist Gilbert Chilvers finds himself caught up in the shenanigans. He has plenty on his plate already, dealing with the social-climbing aspirations of his wife, Toni Feetenby's Joyce, and the eccentric behaviour of his dotty mother-in-law (Louise Leaf), but not ebough in the bank to influence the self-seeking councillors into granting him business premises on the high street.

Whereupon Joyce, the Lady Macbeth of this piece, sees the only way to break into high society and gain an invitation to the function is to pig-nap the porker.

Bennett, Cowen and Lipman locate a deep mine of northern humour in the hypocrisy of the small-town martinets (Craig Kirby's Dr Swaby, Neil Foster's Mr Lockwood and Chris Speight's Mr Allardyce) amid a thriving black market in Shephardsford, or Ilkley as Readman relocates it.

The "them and us" world is enhanced by director-designer Readman favouring a traverse set design, the audience placed either side of a stage whose flooring has multiple prints of newspaper adverts and cuttings of the time.

Stefani Lyons and Readman's choreography has to be tight and concise but is still bursting with life and the cast bring out all the perkiness in Stiles and Drewe's swing songs, while capturing the spirit of this most English of comedies with a lightness of comic touch.

Delightful performances abound, with Sowter, Feetenby and Leaf sparring well, and plenty of sparks from Kirby and Hird. The musical direction of Barbara Chen and keyboard playing of Sam Johnson do the songs proud, and the hair and make-up team of Cherylene Grivon and Abbie Oxley have the period look off to a T.

As for the star of the show, puppeteer Elanor Dunn and her Betty are in crackling, I mean, cracking form.

Betty Blue Eyes, Pick Me Up Theatre, Friargate Theatre, York, until Saturday, except tonight. Box office: 01904 613000 or pickmeuptheatre.com