Alan Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking comes to the Manchester Library

May 21 2009 by Kathryn Quayle, Flintshire Chronicle

Master playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s hilarious 1960s comedy about relationships and misunderstandings, Relatively Speaking, completes another successful season at the Library Theatre in Manchester.

The production runs from May 22–June 20 and will be directed by the Library Theatre’s artistic director Chris Honer.

Young couple Greg and Ginny, although very much a ‘new’ couple, have fallen in love and have started plans to get married, and all is going swimmingly in their lives as they discuss their big day.

However, when a number of odd and unexpected happenings start occurring at home, a suspicious Greg starts to think that there is more to Ginny than first meets his eye, and that he might not even be the only man in her life.

One day, Ginny announces she is going to ‘visit her parents’, who live out of town and who Greg has yet to meet. Greg’s curiosity gets the better of him and he takes the decision to follow her – without Ginny’s knowledge.

Can the couple he confronts really be his future parents-in-law? The confusions are about to begin.

With its mix of comic innuendo, madcap confusion, and high farce, this hilarious comedy, written in 1965 and designed to keep holidaymakers amused as they escaped the rain in Scarborough, established Alan Ayckbourn as one of British theatre’s most reliable sources of laughter.

Making his Library Theatre debut as Greg is Royal Shakespeare Company actor Simon Harrison. On TV, Simon has appeared in programmes including Kavanagh QC, Rockliffe’s Babies, and Surgical Spirit.

Alongside Simon, and making a swift return to the Library Theatre following her run as Czech dissident Lenka in the Library’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll in February this year, which was also directed by Chris Honer, is Leila Crerar as Ginny.

The other couple in the play, Sheila and Philip, are played by two Library Theatre favourites, Lucy Tregear, who appeared on the Library Theatre stage in The Memory Of Water (2002), Alan Ayckbourn’s The Real Thing (2005), and, most recently, Much Ado About Nothing (2006), both of which were directed by Chris Honer; and Malcolm Scates, who is currently starring as Ralph Mellor in the BBC 1 drama Waterloo Road.

For booking information, Visit www.librarytheatre.com or ring 0161 236 7110.