Relatively Speaking (Ayckbourn play)
play written by Alan Ayckbourn
Relatively Speaking is a 1965 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, originally titled Meet My Father, his first major success.
Setting
The action of the play takes place during a summer weekend in the bed-sitting-room of Ginny's London flat and on the garden patio of Sheila and Philip's home in Buckinghamshire, outside London. The time is 1965.
Characters
Ginny – A young woman with a chequered past
Greg – Ginny's current boyfriend
Philip – Ginny's former employer and ex-lover
Sheila – Philip's wife
Synopsis
The play opens in the flat of Greg and Ginny, a young co-habiting couple, Ginny being the more sexually experienced. Greg finds a strange pair of slippers under the bed and is too besotted to believe they might have been left by another man (which would also explain the bunches of flowers and boxes of sweets filling Ginny's apartment). Ginny goes off for a day in the country, supposedly to visit her parents but actually to break things off with her older married lover, Philip. Greg decides to follow her.
The next scene is on the patio at the home of Philip and his befuddled wife Sheila, whose marriage is clearly under strain. Greg shows up unannounced before Ginny, and wrongly assumes that they are her parents. Greg asks for her hand from Philip, while Philip mistakenly believes that the strange young man is asking permission to marry Sheila.
“Relatively Speaking (Ayckbourn play)” enters the record as play written by Alan Ayckbourn. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Relatively, Speaking and Ayckbourn can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7310816. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “Relatively Speaking (Ayckbourn play)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.