How The Other Half Loves at the Old Vic: Implausible and dated farce

Alan Ayckbourn is an admirably prolific master craftsman of the stage but his comedies don’t make me laugh. The Scarborough-based Bard of bourgeois discomfiture has penned 91 plays and won seven Evening Standard theatre awards in 87 years but the new works and revivals that reach London these days seem contrived. Philip Breen’s production of this 1969 farce about infidelity and misapprehension, with its intricately overlapping locations and timelines, is a case in point. It’s meticulously plotted and executed, elegantly staged in the round as originally conceived, and coasts successfully on the comic timing of Dorothy Atkinson and Roger Allam (still silkily hilarious despite fluffing his lines several times on opening night). It’s also wildly implausible and dated. I found myself smiling thinly amid belly-laughers.Frank and Fiona Foster (Allam and Atkinson) are a recognisably sitcom-ish couple. He’s a blithe, bumbling managerial figure in some company or other. She’s the irritated and overdressed “her indoors”, who greets Frank’s maundering anecdotes and general haplessness with a basilisk stare. She’s also conducted a liaison with his younger underling Bob Phillips (Rowan Polonski), and on their wedding anniversary to boot.Bob’s a jack-the-lad type with a new baby and his own aggravated wife Teresa (Ayesha Antoine). The socially stratified living and dining rooms of the two couples are enmeshed on Rob Howell’s set, the one defined by avocado starters and sherry, the other by beer and soup. Fiona and Bob make frantic attempts to phone each other while standing side by side, invariably getting the other’s other half, until they finally connect and concoct a cover story. They will claim, respectively, to have been out with Bob and Frank’s colleague William Featherstone and his wife Mary, hearing how *their* marriage has been rocked by infidelity.Laura Elsworthy (Mary Featherstone), Adam Gillen (William Featherstone) and Roger Allam (Frank Foster) in How the Other Half Loves at The Old Vic 2026Manuel HarlanAnd here the improbabilities begin. It makes sense, kind of, for the paternalistic Frank to try to mend the Featherstones’ fictitious rupture over during a dinner party. There’s no reason on earth that Teresa would invite them – two people she barely knows – the following night. Except that this is required for the central conceit where the Featherstones simultaneously inhabit two buttock-clenchingly awkward suppers on consecutive evenings, swivelling between crossed dining tables like goalies in a game of table hockey.Ayckbourn often defines his characters by a single trait for comic purposes: Frank’s vagueness, Fiona’s acid frustration. Adam Gillen’s William is a ferociously uptight control freak who has turned his wife Mary (Laura Elsworthy) into a cringing jelly for whom the simplest act – taking off her gloves, accepting a drink – provokes shrieking paroxysms of anxiety. The mechanics of the second half depend on her unbelievable decision to visit the Phillips’s house the day after dinner has descended into marital warfare. And the abandoned, leering Bob’s similarly nonsensical decision to bully her into drudgery.The play presents itself as a subversion of late-60s patriarchal norms by serving up a relentless diet of sexist tropes and then delivering a half-hearted, you-go-girl redemption speech for Mary at the end. Frank’s urbane, lordly manner is of a piece with Bob’s cocky priapism and William’s clenched and domineering manner, epitomised by the little scolding smacks he gives Mary’s hand for perceived social faux pas. When Fiona asks him how he’d react if his wife cheated on him he replies: “Hit her, perhaps.” You can argue that Ayckbourn was reflecting attitudes of the time, but the gender politics leave a rancid taste.Read MoreWhile the linear dynamics of the Featherstone and Phillips marriages are steadily ramped up throughout, the Fosters exist in a state of queasy stasis, Frank endlessly distracted from finding out the truth. Allam and Atkinson excel at both the physical comic business of farce and the verbal gymnastics of misunderstanding and non-sequitur while the other four are stuck in increasingly frantic gurning. The action doesn’t spring from the personalities here: rather, character is retroactively dictated by the levers of the plot. There’s a cruelty to the way these people are manipulated and put through the emotional wringer. Again, I can admire the chilly precision of Ayckbourn’s stagecraft. But does HTOHL have the ring of authenticity? Ha, bloody ha.