She tells him she’s going to visit her parents, but in fact she’s seeing her older, married lover to call it off. He finds the address and gets there before her, believing he is her father whilst he thinks he is her younger lover. She remains blithely imperturbable throughout. Then she arrives… None of this is noticeably enlightening to a casual reader, but then very little else would be either; Alan Ayckbourn’s breakthrough play needs to be seen for the tangle of cross-purposes and misunderstandings to be appreciated.
    
Even before he had the nerve or the freedom to get adventurous with staging or dramatic structure, Ayckbourn could make the simple seem deceptively complex and vice versa. Here, with only four characters and (apart from the first act) a single set, he generates twist after turn and ensures that every conversation means something entirely different to each participant.
    
In other respects, however, it has not aged so well in the 46 years since it last visited the West End (after premièring in Scarborough in 1965). Illegitimacy is a stigma in that world, even if not to the swinging youngsters with the Hard Day’s Night poster on their flat wall. And for a play which includes the surprised (although, again, not shocked) line “You’d sooner we lived together than got married?” to open on the evening of Parliament’s crucial votes on the gay marriage bill illustrates the distance between the world of Greg and Ginny, Sheila and Philip and ours.
    
The first act, with its fairly serious lovers’ row, shows that Mr A could weave the comic and the more sombre together even early in his career; however, when matters shift into gear they move into more conventional (but non-physical) farce territory. Max Bennett’s Greg has some of the breeziness which a young Richard Briers must have had first time around; Briers’ screen wife in 1970s sitcom The Good Life, Felicity Kendal, sails through the confusion blithely as Sheila. Kara Tointon’s Ginny hints at the other directions in which the same events could have gone, and Jonathan Coy’s Philip enjoys the finest single instant of the evening when his bluster gives way to a moment of total silence and immobility. Lindsay Posner’s production is diligent, but fails to find the sparkle required to revitalise a piece which is now as middle-aged as Philip and Sheila.

Written for the Financial Times.