Review: HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES, Starring Roger Allam, The Old Vic

Flick through any newspaper and at least once a week a columnist will lament the trials and tribulations of modern relationships: ghosting, situationships, adultery, all exacerbated by a drove of dating apps. First performed over fifty years ago, Alan Ayckbourn's bedroom farce bears a striking resemblance to the same complaints, minus the technological garlanding.

Swaggering Jack-the-lad Bob Phillips and uptight housewife Fiona Foster are having an affair. When cornered by their spouses, they invent an alibi pinning blame on "the Featherstones," an innocent couple conscripted as patsies to take the blame.

Wires soon cross when the Featherstones are invited to dinner by both households on consecutive nights. The play’s fulcrum sees Ayckbourn’s ingenuity and theatrical wizardry splice the scenes together, so we watch both dinners implode at once in a scrupulously choreographed blur of slapstick fireworks. Adam Gillen’s mesmerisingly Buster Keaton-like physicality is mostly to credit for this.

But look closer and you see that the sexual chicanery operates along class dynamics. The Fosters are upper-middle class. Patriarch Frank is the head of a vaguely defined “department” and a droning bore overproud of his paternal role. Roger Allam relishes in sending up Frank’s public school pompousness, bobbing around like a stiff-necked owl, haplessly exacerbating the confusion with his amateur sleuthing. The Phillips, by contrast are working class: Bob works at the same firm, several rungs down the ladder and waspishly prowls around before wriggling away from his wife’s suspicions of infidelity.

Philip Breen’s direction ticks like clockwork, slyly hints at their class duality. The Fosters doorbell is a gentle jangle, the Philips, a nerve-jangling buzz. The women simultaneously plan the menus for the dinner parties to hit it home: avocado and quiche in one corner, chicken noodle soup and copious booze in the other.

But Ayckbourn draws the parallels between them, albeit not particularly subtly. The men are spiky chauvinists; the women are buckling under their repression. Behind Fiona’s stiff expression, played with deep sympathy by Dorothy Atkinson, we sense a deeply ennui. Bob’s wife Teresa obsessively pens letters to The Guardian as an attempt to find meaning beyond the domestic shackles of motherhood. The aspiration-middle-class Featherstones are the same: husband William sycophantically sucks up to Frank, and cows his timid wife Mary.

Although our class structures lack mid-century rigidity that gives How the Other Half Loves its character, it still offers an insight into 21st century domesticity that feels uncomfortably current: the resentments that remain unspoken underneath passive aggressive glances and the women talked over by men who mistake masculine bluster for authority, have barely dated at all.

How the Other Half Loves plays at The Old Vic until 19 September

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