ALAN Ayckbourn? Doesn't he just write middle-class farces set somewhere in deepest southern suburbia? No, he doesn't only do that as 80 plays spread over six decades at Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre will testify.

Yet if the lazy pen portrait still has him down as a light farceur, then blame it on the early hits and in particular the one that established the template: the charmingly ever-so-English Relatively Speaking.

It began life as Meet My Father in the Scarborough summer of 1965, before becoming Ayckbourn's first metropolitan hit under its new name with Celia Johnson, Michael Hordern and Richard Briers among the eminent cast at the Duke of York's in 1967.

Robin Herford, he of the long Scarborough association with The Woman In Black, is at the helm for the Bath Theatre Royal's beautifully crafted touring production that is as welcome as a sundown cocktail in the late summer.

The scene-setting opening act is placed in the hands of the play's young "couple", delaying the entrance of star turns Liza Goddard and Robert Powell, and by comparison with what's to come it feels drawn out in Ginny's cramped London flat with its Beatles and Breakfast At Tiffany's posters. Ginny (Lindsey Campbell) and Greg (Antony Eden) are still getting to know each other, rather as we are getting to know them, as they tread somewhat delicately around each other after only a month of courting. Why are there so many bouquets of flowers? Why so many boxes of chocolates? Whose are the slippers under the bed? Questions, questions, questions, all of them asked by Eden's curious, nice but naive Greg, all of them evaded with fish-like slipperiness by Campbell's somewhat distant Ginny, who acts likewise when he asks the biggest question of all: will she marry him? She will mull it while spending the weekend with her parents, she says.

He notes an address scribbled on a packet of fags and duly heads from capital to country – just like Algernon in Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest – on a journey picked out in lights on designer Peter McKintosh's road map of a witty stage curtain.

Greg's unexpected arrival ahead of Ginny at what he assumes to be her parents' abode, to ask her father's permission, sets off a serpentine multitude of misunderstandings, mistaken identities, misread intentions, uncovered infidelities, innocent assumptions and awkward English politeness. All brilliantly orchestrated by Ayckbourn on a delightful country veranda, with the house walls heavy with wisteria, debates over the merits of a new marmalade jar, uninteresting news in the weekend papers and abandoned plans to play golf.

Powell and Goddard, who you may recall appearing together in York in 2014 in Agatha Christie's Black Coffee at the Grand Opera House, may not have a marriage made in heaven in Relatively Speaking but they are perfect comic partners as play-away Philip and stoical Sheila, who holds far more of the cards than he realises. Eden's Greg blooms too in his interaction with all around him; Campbell's Ginny is rather more prickly throughout.

Relatively Speaking, Theatre Royal Bath Productions, Leeds Grand Theatre, tonight at 7.30pm; tomorrow, 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 0844 848 2700 or leedsgrandtheatre.com