This fairly funny comedy by Alan Ayckbourn isn't going to win any prizes for breaking new ground in theatre, but it's a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours.

Set in the 60s, the play revolves around two couples, a young man and woman who live in London, and an older husband and wife in Buckinghamshire. They represent the epitome of 60s culture and values, the young couple being all urban ambition and a little squalor, the older pair sitting smugly in their country house with little to complain about besides the quality of the marmalade.

Thanks to a series of faux pax and misunderstandings, the two collide on a quintessentially English summer Sunday, and we sit back and watch the chaos spill over the garden table.

The performances here aren't bad, especially Liza Goddard's turn as the country wife. She is very sharp, focused and often quite funny, and seems to get most of the best lines. Robert Powell gives it his customary grandness as her husband, and though his characters pomposity and appalling misogyny grates within seconds, it's supposed to. It also has the added bonus of making us identify with and feel sorry for the other characters, or at least two of them.

Perhaps the best thing about this play, other than Goddard's performance, is the set. Not only is it grand in scale but it's brilliantly lit, creating a feeling of a very hot day in the country in an entirely convincing way.

Times may change; attitudes to sex and marriage have certainly changed; but at the heart of it all, us humans don't change at all. That's why Alan Ayckbourn's Relatively Speaking remains absolutely hilarious almost 50 years after its first appearance in the West End.

Ayckbourn's script delivers sharp, insightful farce, which gets right to the heart of human nature. Jealously, lust, middle-class resignation to the way things are – it's all there. And this particular production, starring the impeccable Liza Goddard and effortless Robert Powell, does this comedy of errors proud.

Theatre Royal Bath has stuck to the original 1965 setting of Relatively Speaking, opening as it does in Ginny's brightly-wall-papered bedsit. Ginny's costume is classic 60s it-girl and her tea set is the instantly-recognisably Habitat brown. This is just aesthetics though, and doesn't date the play.

What did catch the audience out were the attitudes, about women in particular, which emerge in the second half of the play. One line drew audible hisses. These moments are tiny, but in contrast to the highly relatable human foibles that have come before, such antiquated views do put a little distance between stage and audience.

Back to the main event though, and with just four characters, each actor had to absolutely shine for this play to work. And it was Liza Goddard, as the middle-class housewife, who shone the brightest. Her timing was faultless and she pitched Sheila perfectly as affectionately confused but by no means a fool.

Antony Eden as Greg, on the other hand, provided some of the most wheeze-inducing laughs. The second of the four acts, where Greg arrives at Philip and Sheila's, shows the play at its best. The intricacy of the writing, everyone's hesitating facial expressions and Greg's sheer innocence and unwitting blunders are hysterical.

The slight weak link was Lindsey Campbell as Ginny. She tried a little too hard in the opening scene and her arrival at Philip and Sheila's wisteria-clad home-counties garden disrupted the beautiful rhythm established in the second scene. It was by no means a bad performance, but one that shone a little less brightly than the others.

This play is so enjoyable though. The two hours absolutely flew by as many in the audience had tears streaming down their face. And what about that ending? Well, as Sheila would say, 'wouldn't you like to know!'