How the Other Half Loves: an ‘ingeniously crafted’ reboot

Roger Allam and Dorothy Atkinson in How the Other Half Loves — Roger Allam delivers a comedic ‘masterclass’ opposite the ‘majestically withering’ Dorothy Atkinson

(Image credit: Manuel Harlan)

“Whether he’s simply putting on his raincoat or making an entrance in his underpants, you can’t take your eyes off Roger Allam,” said Clive Davis in The Times. The veteran actor stars as cuckolded businessman Frank in The Old Vic’s revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s inventive 1969 marital comedy, “How The Other Half Loves” – and he gives a “masterclass” in comic acting. “Every pause, every hesitation, every bumbled phrase is a delight.”

As Frank’s wife Fiona, who is having an affair with one of her husband’s younger underlings, Dorothy Atkinson “brilliantly channels Penelope Keith’s Margo Leadbetter at her most majestically withering”, said Marianka Swain in The Telegraph. And the rest of the six-strong cast in this period-faithful production, directed by Phillip Breen, are also “terrific”.

In Ayckbourn’s world, a “chintzy middle-class living room can be as perilous as a thinly iced pond in a sudden thaw”, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times. Here, the set-up involves the adulterous duo concocting fake alibis involving a hapless third couple, who get invited for dinner by the other two households on successive nights. In a brilliant piece of theatrical daring, Ayckbourn plays out these two “excruciating” evenings simultaneously; the visitors (on rotating chairs) “ricochet between the two ghastly meals, squirming as their hosts play out their marital tensions”.