Relatively Speaking – by Alan Ayckbourn

Greg and Ginny are living together, but Greg is becoming suspicious. He wonders about Ginny’s plan ‘to visit her parents’ and decides to follow her, leading us all into a tangled web of hilarious mistaken identities right up to the very last sentence. This is the play that made the author a household name. Why? It’s quite simply his most complete comedy, with the plot of a fully-formed farce, plus eccentrically comic but real characters that only Ayckbourn can write. It opened in the West End at The Duke of York’s on 29th March 1967. The night before, Alan Ayckbourn had been a virtual unknown in London; by the next morning he was a star.   The play made impressions elsewhere too: on 2nd May, a telegram arrived from Noël Coward. “Dear Alan Ayckbourn, all my congratulations on a beautifully constructed and very, very funny comedy. I enjoyed every moment of it – Noël Coward.” Speaking of the piece in later years, Ayckbourn recalls: “He [Stephen Joseph] asked me for a play which would make people laugh when their seaside summer holidays were spoiled by the rain and they came into the theatre to get dry”.