If it hasn’t necessarily always been entirely clear why Matthew Warchus decided to reconfigure the Old Vic to an in-the-round set up for his final year in charge of the theatre (some sort of bucket list thing?) it does all pay off with this fine revival of an early Alan Ayckbourn classic.
By the now venerable playwright’s standards, 1969’s How the Other Half Loves is relatively low concept, ie unlike many of his later plays, it’s not about robots. It is, however, explicitly written to be performed in-the-round (ie the stage is in the middle of the theatre), with a single central set standing in for the homes of couples Frank and Fiona Foster and also Teresa and Bob Phillips. Moreover, time is telescoped and chopped up, so that two very different dinner parties that happen on consecutive nights at the two different homes are spliced together into one amusingly unpredictable whole.
Roger Allam’s Frank is a classic naive Ayckbourn protagonist, a well meaning, breathtakingly unperceptive director at a local firm who is absentminded to the point you probably couldn’t write a character like this now without audiences assuming he has dementia.
One thing he’s not absentminded about is his wedding anniversary, which he remembered, unlike his wife Fiona (Dorothy Atkinson), who – sick of Frank’s lack of attentiveness – was out boffing neighbour Bob (Rowan Polonski), who she has been having an affair with.
Not that the terminally amiable Frank really has any suspicions. But as the cogs very slowly turn in his brain vis a vis why Fiona missed their anniversary, and changing the subject becomes less and less viable for her as an option, she needs to find some sort of excuse for what she was doing that night. Meanwhile, across the way, harried young mother Teresa (Ayesha Antoine) is considerably more suspicious of the boorish Bob. Ultimately, the two guilty parties hit upon the plan of using a third couple as an alibi: they tell their partners that problems in Mary and William Featherstone’s marriage necessitated a night on the tiles to talk about it all. The innocent parties suggest having the Featherstones round for dinner - and so we come to the centrepiece of the play, as two different dinner parties are arranged for two consecutive nights (but are staged at the same time). Hilarity ensures.
A funny, zingy, intricately wrought and strangely wholesome play
And actually it really does. Ayckbourn’s characters are undoubtedly pretty tropey: bumbling nice guy Roger, wilting posh lady Fiona, crotchety, exhausted mum Teresa and unspeakable douchebag Bob. But it’s a funny, zingy, intricately wrought and strangely wholesome play that must have felt like a breath of fresh air in the face of the trouser-dropping sex farces of the time. The fact that Philip Breen’ production is period accurate gives it a sweet layer of provincial innocence, evocative of a time where people’s lives were more community based and more socially structured around unglamorous 9-to-5 jobs.
But it’s the brilliant comic performances that make this thing tick. Allam is superb as Frank, who potters around guilelessly in a pair of alarming short shorts, and whose seeming genuine innocence about what is going on is tempered by a ponderous but unstoppable train of thought that an increasingly panicked Fiona can see trundling alarmingly towards her.
The real stars of the show I haven’t yet mentioned, though. Laura Elsworthy and Adam Gillen are wonderful as Mary and William Featherstone. The duo’s outlandish, profoundly unnaturalistic performances give it a real shot in the arm: her absurdly shy and highly strung, him… just really weird, like he’s constantly having an angry Northern seizure, a distant relative of that mad Robot Wars guy Reece Shearsmith’s played in Spaced.
As with this year’s splashy West End revival of Woman in Mind, I find a lot of Ayckbourn’s projects have a more fun concept than execution. But in Breen’s production, How the Other Half Loves still sings, a clever, strangely sweet infidelity farce that’s of the ‘60s, but remains timelessly funny.
