Relatively Speaking

directed by Colin Robinson

SEASON FROM 13th to 28th Feb

 

In 1967 this play gave Alan Ayckbourn his first West End hit, a brilliantly constructed script, although lighter in texture than many of the 70 plays Ayckbourn has written since, it contains fascinating intimations of the middle-class marital angst that was to become his speciality.

It opens in the flat of Greg and Ginny, a young co-habiting couple, Ginny being the more sexually experienced. Greg finds a strange pair of slippers under the bed and is too besotted to believe they might have been left by another man! Ginny tells Greg she’s visiting her parents in the country, but is actually planning to break off her relationship with the older man Philip and recover some compromising letters! 

Philip and his befuddled wife Sheila are on the patio of their home, whose marriage is clearly under strain and Greg shows up unannounced before Ginny, and wrongly assumes that they are Ginny’s parents! Greg asks for her hand from Philip, while Philip mistakenly believes that the strange young man is asking permission to marry Sheila! Ginny arrives, convinces Philip to play the role of her father and the confusion, panic, desperate lying and mistaken identity routines that follow are an ingenious, hilarious comic joy!