Theatre review: How the Other Half Loves

It's a cliché about farce that it relies heavily on characters running in and out of multiple doors, but most of Alan Ayckbourn's plays have premiered in the round. Maybe this is why he came up with his signature style of incredibly technically convoluted comedies that include conceits like time travel and multiple interlocking plays telling one big story. The latter, The Norman Conquests, was the first show to get the Old Vic specially reconfigured, and after quite a lengthy in-the-round season at the end of Matthew Warchus' tenure we get the playwright's return with How the Other Half Loves: This is the one whose high concept is multiple overlapping scenes, some taking place simultaneously, one 24 hours apart at two dinner parties - and in Phillip Breen's production, Rob Howell's design has the dinner tables literally overlap.

Fiona Foster (Dorothy Atkinson) returns home at 3am; in another house that shares the same living room set, Bob Phillips (Rowan Polonski) does the same. Bob's boss is Fiona's husband Frank (Roger Allam,) and to put him off the scent she tells him that she was up all night consoling the wife of one of his other employees.

Meanwhile Bob is telling his wife Terri (Ayesha Antoine) a similar lie, leaving both spouses convinced that a third couple are having martial problems. The unpreposessing pair of William (Adam Gillen) and Mary Featherstone (Laura Elsworthy) are the unwitting alibi, and the lie gets more complicated when both spouses decide to invite them to dinner on consecutive nights to try and help them get over the rough patch in their marriage.

The play premiered in 1969 but Howell's design has taken it a couple of years later, leaning into a similar orange-and-brown colour palette to Abigail's Party which definitely makes the show feel even more like a 1970s sitcom than it already might. And not one of the ones that's aged particlarly well either - Bob is forever putting Terri down for being a lazy housewife while doing very little himself, and William's subjugation of the already-timid Mary always threatens to tip over into actual violence.

It means that perhaps what's kept Ayckbourn revived so frequently into the 21st century is exactly his skill with those high-concept comic contrivances: Once we really get into the bones of the central scene where we see the Featherstones attend two dinner parties simultaneously, the writing stops relying so heavily on misogynistic gags and can relax into just being a mix of incredibly witty lines wrapped up in a ridiculous premise - the spinning chairs the Featherstones sit on to take them instantly between dining rooms only add to the frantic energy that's already building in the panicked couples around them.

Breen has got his cast drilled down to perfect comic timing, and although there's some attempt to make it feel like the two unpleasant younger men make some kind of progress by the end, Allam's forgetful Frank is the only likeable man, possibly because he's too out of it to say anything too mean to anyone. There as still moments when the attitudes of the time rear their ugly head - one audience member audibly said "what did he say?!" after one particular line of William's - but they shock because the rest of the comedy is done so well that it can make you forget the unpleasantness the story is couched in. Unquestionably a throwback, but it undeniably still works.

How the Other Half Loves by Alan Ayckbourn is booking until the 19th of September at the Old Vic.

Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.