Theatre review: Relatively Speaking, Disgraced

Here are your instructions. Relatively Speaking by Alan Ayckbourn is a comedy classic so you’d better enjoy it or else. The play dates from 1967 when Ayckbourn was working as a sketch writer for Ronnie Barker. It was his first hit. Notes in the programme testify to the play’s excellence. A telegram sent to Ayckbourn by Noël Coward is quoted twice.  ‘Congratulations on a beautifully constructed and very, very funny play.’ Take the Master’s kindness with a pinch of salt.

The script is ingeniously strung out from a rather threadbare premise. Two couples, both with infidelity problems, meet and talk at cross-purposes for an afternoon. The action opens in a dingy London bedsit where fun-loving Ginny is entwined with a dim-witted hunk who wants to marry her. But Ginny plans to spend the day with her older lover in Buckinghamshire. She flees. The hunk follows. When he arrives in Bucks he’s greeted by a greying fatso whom she assumes is Ginny’s dad.