Relatively Speaking
Watermark Theatre, North Rustico
July 10, 2026
As a preteen, I was fond of the 1977 TV series Three’s Company despite being largely oblivious to its racier sex comedy elements (I enjoyed John Rittter’s slapstick antics and Don Knotts’ infinitely hapless Mr. Furley). Many episodes were farces built around comedies of misunderstanding—somebody gets incomplete or incorrect information, jumps to the wrong conclusion and wackiness ensues.
In essence, British playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s 1965 stage hit Relatively Speaking (playing at the Watermark Theatre this summer) is a longer, smarter, wittier, classier, more cynical forerunner of those Three’s Company tales, built as it is around sex and a series of kooky misunderstandings, only with English accents and fancier wordplay.
Greg (played here by Dustin Freeland) is romancing Ginny (Kait Post) in 1960s London when he impulsively seeks her parents’ permission to marry her—unaware that the older couple he mistakenly approaches are Ginny’s married ex-lover Philip (Paul Van Dyck) and his cheerfully clueless wife Sheila (Leni Parker). The confused Philip and Sheila reach their own faulty conclusions about who Greg is and what he is doing there, and the situation spirals deeper into bafflement when Ginny shows up.
This script was one of the prolific Ayckbourn’s earliest and most lasting successes, with him joking in 2014 that the oft-revived play “turned out to be my pension.” Though the show is often called a farce, Ayckbourn rejects that label, describing it as “a fairly actor-proof… little machine of a play” in which “character plays a fairly secondary role” to plot, all engineered largely to “make people laugh.”
Ayckbourn’s script—and Watermark’s production of it, deftly directed by Robert Tsonos—works on that level like gangbusters. It’s a relentlessly comical, tirelessly clever, meticulously crafted text, though it also rings a bit hollow at times given how glibly above-it-all the characters often seem, more plot engines and laugh generators than people. Greg is a partial exception to that as the most idealistic, most fanciful and most stubbornly deluded character, though even he has moments of breezily casual cynicism.
Regarding the cast, Tsonos’s fab four all have serviceable British accents and solid comic timing, the Freeland-Post duo has good chemistry (also on display in Watermark’s Sugar Road this season), and Parker looks palpably, delightfully confused as the long-hoodwinked Sheila, but the best of the lot is Van Dyck’s Philip.
Playing the stuffiest yet sleaziest of the four characters, Van Dyck looks like he’s having the time of his life as he toggles between Philip’s default setting of pompous propriety, flashes of lascivious leering and fits of apoplectic consternation, oscillating from artful decorum to over-the-top fury and back again like some overcaffeinated latter-day John Cleese. It’s a hilarious, high-energy performance that leaves no scenery unchewed.
Said scenery comes courtesy of set/costume designer Sabrina Balliana, who evokes the period well, while sound and lighting design are handled capably by Pat Caron and Kahentanó:ron Brianna Montour, respectively. The production’s coherent blocking, brisk but organic pacing and smooth cast interplay reflect well on Tsonos and stage manager Susan Currie, but the chief selling points here are Ayckbourn’s script and the Freeland-Parker-Post-Van Dyck quartet, who wring even more comedy out of confusion than John Ritter and his TV castmates. Three’s Company, sure, but four’s a crowd-pleaser.