In Relatively Speaking (1965) there is a moment of sublime confusion which typifies the play and points to the thematic base beneath its glittering surface. Unfaithful husband Phillip thinks that Greg is his wife's lover and that he wants to marry her. But Greg is really the new boyfriend of Phillip's own exmistress, who announces that she has had a proposal of marriage. Phillip says ‘Infectious this marriage epidemic. I seem to be the only one who's developed immunity'.

We are at once given a snapshot of the entire play and of the agenda which was to form the basis of the Ayckbourn canon. The relationships between men and women and the particular strains which the process and state of marriage inflict are the subject matter of the plays. Whatever the unfortunate Phillip thinks he is immune to, he is inevitably to be confounded. In Ayckbourn's plays, no one is immune to marriage or at least to the pursuit of the conjoining of man and woman. To imagine that you can be safe is foolish; individuals married or single are open to ambush by predatory individuals in pursuit of marital bliss or desperate to escape its clutches.

We do, however, encounter unmarried couples in this comic world who have just met and are in the initial throes of love or lust. In Relatively Speaking we first meet Greg and Ginny together in her Chelsea flat. They are clearly lovers and he has asked her to marry him; innocent young love preparing for a happy future. But lurking, quite literally, under the bed is the worm in this love apple.

Greg finds a pair of slippers there, not his own, and not, despite Ginny's feeble suggestion, the property of the pet dog. The poor young man is too besotted to tumble to the notion that they might have been left behind by another lover, and that this might explain the innumerable bunches of flowers in the bathroom. Indeed, he is so infatuated, he believes her story that she is setting out to visit her parents, and decides to follow her. But he will not only arrive at Ginny's parents home to ask for her hand in marriage; he will fall into one of Ayckbourn's suburban traps. Ginny's real errand is to break off from her previous sexual partner, Phillip, an older married man, and demand the return of incriminating letters.