Review of Loft Theatre Company production of Relatively Speaking (2014)

It’s somewhat startling to realise that so many of Alan Ayckbourn’s comedies now fall into the category of period pieces. And none more so than this, his breakthrough play from 1967.

As with the works of Agatha Christie, Brian Rix, Ray Cooney and the like, the trick today is to avoid seeming dated while at the same time acknowledging the whims and attitudes of a bygone era. Here director David Hankins treads a careful middle path to maximise the wit and sparkle of the dialogue while accepting that it comes nowhere near the dark undertones which were to epitomise the later and much meatier Ayckbourn style.

For the most part, it is great fun once we reach the colourful and splendidly designed garden patio setting where romantic complications kick in with a vengeance. These concern a young woman pretending to her boyfriend that her much-older lover is her father, thus enabling events to spiral into a veritable melting-pot of chaos and confusion also involving the older man’s wife.

This is where Tim and Kate Willis, real-life married couple playing the senior pair, relish some fine moments of comedy, sparking off each other and contrasting effectively. He by turn swaggers, cajoles and panics while she, as a forerunner of later Ayckbourn supposedly steady wives, remains calm and imperturbable until, in one glorious moment, she is driven to ask of her uninvited young male visitor: ‘Do you think he’s a psychopath?’

The production has one major problem to overcome. The first scene set in the younger couple’s flat lacks any real sense of pace or style and provides a tedious, under-played opening to what later, thankfully, turns into bright entertainment. It’s much to the credit of Jimmy Proctor that he is able subsequently to raise his performance and deliver young man Greg as a quirky and amusing romantic.

Mostly, then, this is a well-judged crowd pleaser to start the Loft’s new season.

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Peter McGarry is an experienced, independent professional theatre critic who has agreed to review Loft Theatre Company productions.

The agreement with the Loft is that Peter is free to express his opinions for good or ill. The Loft Theatre Company has no control whatsoever over the content of these reviews and will never comment publicly on what he writes.