How the Other Half Loves

Synopsis

One of Ayckbourn's early plays. How The Other Half Loves is an ingenious, funny and brilliantly crafted masterpiece, which juggles time and space to present the lives and loves, passion and panic of three married couples in a play of love and laughter, meals and mayhem. Like all of Ayckbourn s comedies it is about the precise interaction of sex and class in modern English society. Bob Phillip s liaison with his boss s wife is in danger of being discovered by their respective spouses. Each attempt to wriggle out of suspicion by projecting their own infidelity on to a third, totally innocent, uninteresting and unsuspecting couple - the Featherstones. The action takes place at two dinner parties given on different nights. The single set is almost a character in itself, so important is it to the action. It represents two living-dining rooms at once. The furniture and often the people of the two places are intermingles, most notably in the scene that closes the first act, when one hapless couple is having Thursday night dinner with another pair and Friday night dinner with the third. The ensuing action leads to a string of misunderstandings and almost farcical events with hilarious consequences in one of Alan Ayckbourn s best loved comedies. Like all first-rate comedies, the play is only funny because it tackles serious issues.

Our Review:

16 August 2007

Alan Ayckbourn changed domestic comedy for good – and probably for the better – when he wrote this structurally innovative class war-fare drama nearly forty years ago.

The play was a commercial hit because Robert Morley played the overbearing Frank Foster and imposed his own persona on the role, as well as inventing new lines, such as the remark that, toilet- paper wise, the house was fresh out of “bathroom stationery.”

But I have never seen a better, more bitter version than Alan Strachan’s acute and beautifully acted touring revival for the Peter Hall Company in Bath.

Technically, the play is revealed as a masterpiece of plotting and counter-presentation: the managerial Fosters and the lower status Phillips’s host two separate dinner parties on successive evenings that are shown, simultaneously, revolving around the repeat invitation to the humble working class Featherstones (Paul Kemp and Amanda Royle, both brilli...

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Latest User Review

S Welch - 28 August 2007:

Very good!! A very entertaining evening - excellent timing really made the comedy work well. My husband and I and two friends all agreed - a great production all round!...

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