Ayckbourn, Relatively Speaking

Relatively Speaking (1965) was Ayckbourn's first big hit in the West End, played by big names (Richard Briers, Michael Hordern, Celia Johnson) and earning a congratulation from Noel Coward. Radio 4 Extra broadcast a production yesterday in celebration of the playwright's 75th birthday. It's evocative of its time - the speech habits somehow conjured up the seventies programmes of my youth - and perhaps a valuable period piece in its insight into the shifting value systems of the swinging sixties. Yet for all its patina of age it comes over freshly today, thanks to the brilliant writing and deft characterisation. Ayckbourn had said he set out consciously to write a well-made play, and Relatively Speaking has the precise farcical clockwork of Wilde, and behind him Sheridan and Goldsmith. It's a delight to find oneself caught up in the elaborate machinery of this tight four-hander. The humour comes from a ludicrous series of mistaken identities, delivered quickly enough to be convincing and yielding wonderful sustained passages of dialogue which can be taken two ways. The bite comes from the hints of dark duplicity at the core of things, and the end leaves us doubting whether any enduring relationship is possible in the world the play creates. Beneath the gentility lies something deadly: Pinter's image for his plays, 'the weasel in the cocktail cabinet', applies equally to Ayckbourn. A brilliant theatrical moment in the 'father's' plan for a business trip, then topped by the lining of a pair of slippers. Only the innocent young man at the centre of it all comes over as an improbably naïve drip in the harder cooler 21st century. A joy to listen to after Sunday lunch while more intrepid souls are pounding the London Marathon, and a reminder in the days of experiment and shock drama of the enduring richness of craftsmanship and a good ear for the follies of man, ay and woman too.