Review Roundup: Did Critics Adore HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES?

Alan Ayckbourn’s brilliantly crafted masterpiece juggles time and space to present the lives and loves, passion and panic of three married couples. The action takes place at two dinner parties given on different nights, with situations that lead to a string of misunderstandings and almost farcical events with hilarious consequences. A single set represents two living-dining rooms at once. The play tackles contemporary issues of sex and class in English society… creating true comedy we all can relate to.

What did the critics think?

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

Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan

Alexander Cohen, BroadwayWorld: 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.

Nick Curtis, The Standard: It makes sense, kind of, for the paternalistic Frank to try to mend the Featherstones’ fictitious rupture over during a dinner party. There’s no reason on earth that Teresa would invite them – two people she barely knows – the following night. Except that this is required for the central conceit where the Featherstones simultaneously inhabit two buttock-clenchingly awkward suppers on consecutive evenings, swivelling between crossed dining tables like goalies in a game of table hockey.

Alice Saville, The Independent: There's an uncomfortable edge under all this silliness, a barely suppressed threat of domestic violence that was no doubt funnier to 1960s audiences (who might have laughed less uncomfortably at the moment when an abused wife is offered a bloody mary to drink). These characters aren't afraid of social agonies they're in danger of actual physical harm, as the rage that's been heating up in these stuffy homes starts to burn, angrier than a chip-pan fire.

Clive Davis, The Times: Ayckbourn piles up the misunderstandings on a set that represents the overlapping homes of the Fosters and the Phillipses. The two couples flit in and out, oblivious of each other. Breen keeps the physical humour sparking along, just as he did in his hyperactive, open-air version of The Comedy of Errors at the RSC. Telephones occupy a central role in the plot. Younger audience members will no doubt be baffled by the reference to something called the speaking clock.

Sam Marlowe, The Stage: It’s a complex dance in which two couples ensnared in duplicity drag a third into their machinations, with escalating farcical complications. In Phillip Breen’s in-the-round production, it’s emphatically of its time, and makes no effort to disguise the fact – and, performed by a crack cast, it still delivers some belly laughs. But it also feels overlong and occasionally laborious, the comic engine taking time to grind into gear and the broadly drawn characters sometimes grating, for all the energy of their embodiment here.

Cheryl Markosky, London Theatre: Designer Rob Howell's loud, swirly fashion choices (don't miss Fiona's hideous green skirt and puffy white blouse in the second act) displayed against a background of wicker furniture and bright dial-up phones cements us in the late 1960s. That period mirth is effectively juxtaposed with the frustrations of trapped middle-class folk in suburban England – a disease still requiring urgent treatment today. Luckily, Ayckbourn prescribes a restorative cure with this invigorating evening's entertainment.

Average Rating: 73.3%