“How the Other Half Loves” at the Old Vic
Neil Dowden on the South Bank
★★★★☆
15 August 2026
Alan Ayckbourn’s 1969 play How the Other Half Loves not only confirmed his success as a hugely popular comic playwright but also revealed the innovative stagecraft that became a trademark in his subsequent prolific career. The piece has been regularly revived including in the West End ten years ago, but this sure-footed production by Philip Breen is the first time since its premiere in Scarborough that it has been staged in the round. This seems fitting as part of the final season of the Old Vic’s artistic director Matthew Warchus who directed Ayckbourn’s trilogy The Norman Conquests in the same format here in 2008.
Ayesha Antoine, Roger Allam and Rowan Polonski.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
As so often in Ayckbourn, the plot revolves around failed marriages amongst the middle classes, with three couples becoming entangled in an adulterous affair. Fiona Foster is secretly sleeping with Bob Phillips, who works for her manager husband Frank, while his wife Teresa is preoccupied with looking after their toddler son. As their respective spouses grow suspicious Bob and Fiona use as alibis another unwitting couple, William (an accountant in the same firm) and Mary Featherstone. Inevitably this leads to further complications and misunderstandings that while frequently hilarious also expose toxic marital relations and social divisions.
Each couple’s relationship is skilfully differentiated, as is their class status. The upper-middle-class Fosters have a more privileged lifestyle, but the frustrated Fiona is bored rigid with the benevolently befuddled Frank. The Phillips have gone beyond any pretence of good manners as the chauvinistic Bob – the “office Romeo” – seeks escape from the commitments of a domesticated life with the struggling Teresa. And the socially awkward Featherstones may seem merely vapid at first, but William’s coercive control of the neurotically repressed Mary is disturbingly misogynistic.
How the Other Half Loves may appear a bit dated in its depiction of gender relations (and it would be nigh impossible to modernize it away from its period setting), but there is still enough that resonates with audiences today to make it worthwhile reviving. And though the plot machinations are sometimes contrived (while the ending is rather a cop-out) and some characterization slips into caricature, it’s inventive and extremely funny. The play has its moments of dark humour – which Ayckbourn developed to greater effect later in his career – but it leans much more towards farce in the way the work is cleverly devised, with scenes overlapping in space and time.
Roger Allam as Frank Foster.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
The Fosters’ and Phillips’ homes are both presented on stage at the same time, with Rob Howell’s set carefully distinguishing the former’s posher furniture and accessories from the latter’s shabbier living room. Adjacent red and green telephones are used to great comic effect as calls are made between the two households by the adulterers – or their spouses – with the caller often having to stay silent when the “wrong” person picks up. Under Breen’s meticulously choreographed direction we see characters criss-crossing the stage in close proximity with each other although in different houses. The structural ingenuity comes to a climax in the simultaneous staging of two dinner parties on successive nights in each house, with one table crossed over the other, as the Featherstones swivel around in their chairs to face their respective hosts.
None of this would work without brilliantly precise performances from all of the cast, which is the case here. Roger Allam excels with comic timing as the well-meaning but hopelessly confused Frank, who offers paternalistic marriage counselling advice to the other couples as if leading a team meeting at work. Ayckbourn veteran Dorothy Atkinson is also outstanding in making us feel Fiona’s intense irritation with her pedantic husband as well as her moderate guilt. Rowan Polonski’s shallowly laddish, beer-swilling Bob meets his match when Ayesha Antoine’s angry Teresa finally gives him what he deserves in a knockabout chase. The deferential manner and rigid body language of Adam Gillen’s William later give way to uncontrolled rage as his slaps on the hands of Laura Elsworthy’s “mousy” Mary turn much more violent, though she later asserts herself in a hopeful nod to the future.
