“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”.
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The dinner party sequence ranks, alongside the middle act of Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off”, as “the most ingeniously crafted and reliably hilarious half-hour in English farce”, said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. But while the play’s “geometric cleverness” remains fresh, other aspects have aged, in particular the gender stereotypes. Breen “sensibly treats it as a period drama”.
I’m afraid I found it all “implausible and dated”, said Nick Curtis in The Standard. The problem is that the “action doesn’t spring from the personalities here: rather, character is retroactively dictated by the levers of the plot”. It all seems contrived and artificial: I was left “smiling thinly amid belly-laughers”.
The Old Vic, London SE1. Until 19 September.
