Relatively Speaking review

This is the play that in 1967 gave Alan Ayckbourn his first West End hit. Seeing it again after all these years, in Lindsay Posner's witty production, I was reminded of the play's brilliance as a theatrical construct. Although lighter in texture than many of the 70 or so plays Ayckbourn has written since, it

ReviewWyndham's, London

This is the play that in 1967 gave Alan Ayckbourn his first West End hit. Seeing it again after all these years, in Lindsay Posner's witty production, I was reminded of the play's brilliance as a theatrical construct. Although lighter in texture than many of the 70 or so plays Ayckbourn has written since, it contains fascinating intimations of the middle-class marital angst that was to become his speciality.

It even starts with a young cohabiting couple, Greg and Ginny, whose relationship, after only a month, is dwindling into fractiousness. The naive Greg is hurt and perplexed not only by the unsolicited gifts arriving hourly at their flat but by Ginny's decision to take off alone one Sunday, ostensibly to see her parents in the country. In reality, Ginny is going to descend on the home of her married boss, Philip, to put an end to their affair. When Greg impulsively follows Ginny, the way is open to a dizzying series of misunderstandings: Greg assumes he is meeting his girlfriend's parents while Philip initially takes Greg to be the lover about whom his own wife, Sheila, has ostentatiously fantasised.

Ayckbourn not only extends the mistaken-identity gag in ways that put Goldoni or Goldsmith in the shade, he also takes English comedy out of the drawing room into the garden, and in the process shows the marital pain that exists on the patio. The opening exchanges between the petulant Philip ("I can't say I'm very taken with this marmalade") and his wife are as bilious as those between Edward and Flora in Pinter's A Slight Ache. The unhappy Sheila, countering her husband's infidelity by creating her own imagined lover, is clearly a forerunner of the disintegrating Susan in Woman in Mind. And there is one astonishing scene when Philip and Sheila, talking entirely at cross-purposes about Ginny's married lover, reveal the depths of their own antagonism.

Even this early in his career, Ayckbourn showed that he could conjure laughter out of marital misery, and the actors in Posner's production are all the funnier for playing the situation for real. Felicity Kendal's excellent Sheila looks genuinely wounded at Philip's revelation that he's planning a 10-day European business-trip. And while Kendal scoops up a lot of laughs at Sheila's bewilderment at the arrival of Greg and Ginny, she simultaneously suggests a nice middle-class woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Jonathan Coy's Philip is a comic figure driven to beetroot-coloured apoplexy and the prototype of all those patronising Ayckbourn husbands who see their wives as domestic appendages, saying of Sheila at one point: "She costs me 30 quid a week to run and that doesn't include overheads."

The harder roles are those of the young couple but Max Bennett has the right bemused innocence as Greg and Kara Tointon subtly hints at Ginny's sexual experience. Their poky flat, adorned with posters of Breakfast at Tiffany's and Goldfinger, is as accurately created in Peter McKintosh's design as the sunlit garden occupied by their astonished hosts. But, although it is delightfully done, the evening's success is due to Ayckbourn, whom we consistently underestimate. He is as funny as any of the classic comedy writers and, in this early piece, showed how prolonged misunderstanding can become a source of painful truth.

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