The Old Vic has revived a 1969 farce, and the reason is written into the set
Alan Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves runs at the Old Vic until 19 September, with Roger Allam and Adam Gillen. A theatre chooses a fifty-seven-year-old comedy for reasons the design makes plain.
The Old Vic is running Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves until 19 September, directed by Phillip Breen, with Roger Allam and Dorothy Atkinson as the Fosters and Adam Gillen and Laura Elsworthy as the Featherstones. It is a fifty-seven-year-old farce, and the choice to stage it now is not a mystery. The evidence is on the stage floor.
One set, two houses
Ayckbourn’s device, and the reason the play is still produced, is a single set that is two living rooms at once, overlaid on top of each other. The Fosters’ comfortable home and the Phillipses’ scruffier one occupy the same space simultaneously. The famous centrepiece is a dinner party that is really two dinner parties, held on two different evenings, played at one table at the same time, with the guests turning from one host to the other mid-sentence.
That is a piece of theatrical engineering an audience cannot get from a screen, and it is the kind of live-only spectacle a large house programmes when it needs a show that justifies the ticket. The set, by Rob Howell, is the argument for the revival before a word is spoken.
Why this play, why now
How the Other Half Loves premiered at the Library Theatre in Scarborough on 31 July 1969, Ayckbourn’s ninth play, written when he was thirty. It reached the West End at the Lyric in August 1970 and made his name. Nearly six decades of productions have proved it does what a big theatre needs a summer show to do: it is funny, it is a machine that runs itself once wound, and it carries a starry cast without needing one.
The casting reflects that. Allam is among the most reliable draws in British theatre; Gillen, known for television comedy, calls this his first deliberate comic stage role and credits the writing for it. “Everything is there for you on the page,” he told London Theatre. “It’s so specific. All the ums and ahs are written.”
The unfashionable thing a revival admits
There is a version of the argument that treats reviving a 1969 farce as a failure of nerve, choosing a safe old machine over a new and untested play. That is not quite fair, but it is not nothing either. A subsidised-era classic is a known quantity in a summer when known quantities sell.
What keeps the play from feeling like a museum piece is that its subject has not dated as much as its telephones have. It is about three couples, class, money and the lies people tell to hold a marriage together, and the mechanism that exposes them is misunderstanding rather than malice. Breen’s production, staged in the round as Ayckbourn first wrote it, is betting that the machinery still works on an audience that has seen everything except two dinner parties at once.
The bet is a sound one. The interesting question a revival like this raises is not whether the old play holds up, which it plainly does, but what it costs a major theatre to find a new one that could. On the evidence of the programme, that remains the harder thing to stage.