Alan Ayckbourn’s “How the Other Half Loves” at the Old Vic: Technically Brilliant if Rather Overlong and Old-Fashioned West End Farce

Is there a crisis in British new writing? The comparative paucity of new work in mainstream theatre is bad news for some UK playwrights, but good news for those whose back catalogues are graced with revivable gems. One such is Alan Ayckbourn, whose 90-strong oeuvre is absolutely stuffed with modern classics. So the Old Vic, already riding high due to its highly successful transfer of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, which finishes its run in the West End next month, has dipped into Ayckbourn’s box of treasures to revive How the Other Half Loves, which was first staged in 1969, and now stars the always bankable Roger Allam in an enjoyable evening.

This two-act farce takes place on one shared set which represents two living rooms, occupied by two couples: Frank (Allam) and Fiona Foster are the older, more polite, more emotionally distant upper-middle-class pair. Frank, who is the boss of a local company employs both Bob Phillips and William Featherstone. Bob and his wife Teresa are a younger, more expressive couple, with a new baby; Bob is known as what was once called “a ladies’ man”, while she worries as much about global events as about his careless behaviour. When Bob and Fiona have a brief sexual affair that involves them returning home in the middle of the night, they conceal this by inventing alibis involving an innocent third couple, the socially awkward accountant William Featherstone and his timid wife Mary, whose marriage they claim is on the rocks (it isn’t). When the Fosters and the Phillipses each invite the Featherstones to dinner on successive nights, it looks like the truth will come out.

Which, being a farce, it inevitably does. This example of Ayckbourn’s early work, a breakthrough moment in his career, includes a lot of what became his writing hallmarks, such as the comedy of errors, but also of character and manners. His delight in creating excruciating embarrassment, with class satire and the darker side of suburban complacency, comes wrapped in a theatrically impressive form, whose simultaneous overlaps between the events happening in two different locations are technically brilliant. Whether this makes up for the slightly depressing familiarity of the writing style, and the datedness of the attitudes of the characters’ behaviour, is another matter.

Unlike traditional British farce, where the comedy depends on the suspected characters being innocent, How the Other Half Loves features two adulterers, Bob and Fiona, who create chaos because of their deceptions. The unpleasantness of their involving the Featherstones in their lies is enhanced by the fact Ayckbourn has heavily caricatured this couple, the humble husband being a domestic tyrant and the mousy wife a bundle of neuroses. They are surely to be pitied rather than exploited. But comedy often has a cruel side, and this creates feelings of guilty pleasure in the audience, who laugh at everyone’s awfulness. Frank is amusingly baffled by other people, including his wife; Bob is reliably nasty, Teresa comically frantic, William only ever uptight and Mary only — until a couple of memorable moments — submissive. So yes, if you love caricature and eccentric English soap opera personalities, the play has plenty of laugh aloud moments.

However old-fashioned, this is also a play which explores how sexual frustration is both cause and symptom of emotional distance in marriage. Clearly, the fact that both Bob and Fiona look for sex outside of their couple shows that their relationships are arid. Yet there are differences, maybe based on their different ages: Bob’s anger with Teresa is due in part to her being more attentive to their baby than to him, and his roving eye is evidence of his own narcissism. Man-childs all. All the men dominate their wives, demand domestic work from them and expect obedience. Their response to the 1960s ideology of the Permissive Society doesn’t yet include feminism, although Ayckbourn’s women do, at a couple of points, fight back with vigour and verbal clarity.

Although some might find the textual references to social assumptions — such as Fiona’s joke about women not being able to do maths or William’s certainty that if Mary is unfaithful he will hit her — more than a bit dated, the play does challenge us to ask whether things are really so different today. With rising levels of violence against women and girls, and toxic masculinity, as well as pink pill and trad wife ideology, I can’t confidently assert that so much has changed. Likewise, the marital bickering in the play is very realistic, and some of the word play — “toilet stationery” for loo paper — remains witty enough to draw smiles.

Phillip Breen’s in-the-round production, designed by Rob Howell, delivers Ayckbourn’s simultaneous scenes, especially the episode of the two overlapping dinner parties, with precision, and the farce definitely has a good momentum. Allam’s Frank is often amusingly exasperating, especially as this character’s thinking is slow and cumbersome, while Dorothy Atkinson’s Fiona is both snobby and tactically silent. By contrast, Rowan Polonski’s confident Bob and Ayesha Antoine’s feisty, fussy Teresa are more realistic and have more depth than the OTT performances of Adam Gillen (William) and Laura Elsworthy (Mary), who are frankly comic grotesques. Yet all the actors do rise to the challenges of Ayckbourn’s technically amazing, if rather overlong and overfamiliar drama.

With the Mike Leigh classic, Abigail’s Party, opening next week in the West End, the genre of suburban 1970s comedies is making a crowd-pleasing return. But does this mean that nostalgic evocations of an old world are now more popular than new plays? Maybe. Let’s see what September brings.

• How the Other Half Loves is at the Old Vic until 19 September.