Oh, what a tangled web we weave…
Alan Ayckbourn’s almost 60-year-old How the Other Half Loves is still unsurprisingly modern, unsurprising because it’s about toxic masculinity overwhelming the female partners in relationships, writes Michael Holland.
But it is still unsurprisingly funny, although now it feels quite wrong to think so. Written in the early days of Women’s Liberation, there would have been an implied message for the future. The message, however, did not get through to all areas.
Philip Breen’s direction works wonders with Ayckbourn’s script that has us watching two couples living their parallel lives at the same time, overlapping in a real-life Venn diagram as Philip Foster (Roger Allam), in the upper-class home, questions his wife Fiona (Dorothy Atkinson) about her whereabouts the evening before – Their wedding anniversary – While Terry (Ayesha Antoine) wants to know where husband Bob was until 2am. It quickly becomes clear that Bob (Energetically played by Rowan Polonski) was out with Fiona, his boss’s wife. And, surprisingly, it does not confuse.
The confusion comes when the two guilty parties use The Featherstones’ ‘failing marriage’ as their alibis, and the victims of the duplicity, Frank and Terry, invite William (the firm’s accountant) and Mary Featherstone round to dinner on consecutive nights in order to get to some truth. Now there are three couples in the Venn diagram but spread over two nights, having dinner, while we watch the deceit playing out live.
Questions are asked, answers shock, more lies are told, and innocent William Featherstone is accidentally doused in soup by Terry Phillips, who was actually aiming for husband Bob. Like a flash, as the scene reverts to dinner at the Fosters, the damp shirt is waved away as William sitting under a leak. Genius stroke from Ayckbourn. Major laughter ensues. Break for interval as we come to terms with the mayhem.
Act Two picks up with the two guilty persons’ lies being believed and becoming the mainstay of the plot, i.e., Bob and Fiona are in the clear, and poor William (Adam Gillen) and Mary (Laura Elsworthy) are thought to be having torrid affairs.
As farces are usually wont to do, everything gets cleared up in the end, but there is no all’s well that ends well here. The finale is quite scrappy. I felt that, Hollywood-style, three different endings had been written and tried out on focus groups, who would vote for the best. Unlike Hollywood, they went with all three, and the web remained pretty tangled.
But who cares when the writing is great, the team effort in making the play work is admirable, and you have standout performances from Allam and Gillen? You can even excuse the threats of domestic violence against poor Mary, Frank believing that ‘acrimony in a marriage is better than nothing’, and how the supposedly radical Terry puts up with philanderer Bob.
Old Vic until Sept 19th.
Booking and full details: https://www.oldvictheatre.com/stage/other-half/
