Alan Ayckbourn classic Relatively Speaking heads to Eastbourne and Guildford

“I did the play in 2016,” says Antony, “but we've got a new cast now or at least half a new cast. It came out of Bath and we're on the road for about 12 weeks.”

Now seven years on, Antony is in the same play, in the same role: “That doesn't happen very often... Well, actually it happens more often than you think. With the Shakespeare things that come up all the time, you end up in the same play over and over again and I've also done Taking Steps a couple of times, another Ayckbourn play, a lovely little farce.”

So what's the thinking behind returning to a play?

“It depends entirely on the play. I think sometimes you are just thinking ‘No, I've done that, I've gone as far as I possibly can with that one’, but sometimes you just think no, you want to do it again, and with this one it is such a pleasure that you get from the audiences’ reactions.

"The laughs come so fast and thick and are virtually so guaranteed and there is a lovely playfulness to the timing that is all part of the challenge. With this one it was hard to say no. I'm playing the same character but I'm trying to approach it differently to an extent. But it's very hard to do that. There is a lot of muscle memory that is pretty strong, the rhythms that you get into. It's hard to break that but we're coming back to it with a few more years of maturity now… though it is difficult to talk about maturity when you're doing a play as silly as this one! But perhaps with this production there is a little bit more nuance to it and perhaps we've got a little bit more variety to it this time.”

Antony is playing Greg who met Ginny a month ago and is sure that she's the girl for him. When she tells him that she's going to visit her parents, he decides this is the moment to ask her father for his daughter's hand in marriage. Discovering a scribbled address, he follows her to Buckinghamshire where he finds Philip and Sheila enjoying a peaceful Sunday morning breakfast in the garden. The only thing is, they're not Ginny's parents…

“Ginny is a young but sexually experienced woman and Greg is a very inexperienced man and they have fallen in love. It is his first relationship but she has had previous lovers and she's trying to distance herself from an older ex-lover. She goes to see him to try to break off the relationship but Greg thinks that she is actually visiting her parents. It is a comedy of confusion. It starts off with a titter and by the end of the first half you're really laughing and then you just laugh all the way through the second half!”

Alan Ayckbourn is an Olivier and Tony Award-winning playwright whose work has been translated into 35 languages. Knighted in 1997, he is the first British playwright to receive both Olivier and Tony Lifetime Achievement Awards. He has written 84 plays over a career spanning six decades. Relatively Speaking made Ayckbourn a household name, with critics hailing the arrival of a great new comic talent and Noël Coward himself calling it “a beautifully constructed and very funny comedy.”