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# THEATRE REVIEW: How the Other Half Loves @Theatre Royal
- URL: https://www.scenemag.co.uk/review-how-the-other-half-loves-theatre-royal/
- Published: 2017-11-20T23:47:35.000Z
- Updated: 2017-11-28T09:06:20.000Z
- Description: Rather like his recently revived Relatively Speaking, Alan Ayckbourn’s play is a farcical look at an affair and the tortured results of covering it up. The intricate web of lies lead, inevitably, to a whole raft of misunderstandings. Written five years later, How the Other Half Loves is almost exper
- Author: Michael Hootman
- Tags: Arts, In The South, News, Reviews, Theatre

[![](https://www.scenemag.co.uk/content/images/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/aykbourn.jpg)](http://gscene.com/arts/theatre/review-how-the-other-half-loves-theatre-royal/attachment/aykbourn/?ref=scenemag.co.uk)

**Rather like his recently revived Relatively Speaking, Alan Ayckbourn’s play is a farcical look at an affair and the tortured results of covering it up.** The intricate web of lies lead, inevitably, to a whole raft of misunderstandings. Written five years later, *How the Other Half Loves* is almost experimental in the way both time and space are sliced and diced. One couple are seen eating a meal on two separate nights, with two sets of hosts, and the action flicks back and forth between the evenings. But this isn’t just showing off: it demonstrates with a heightened immediacy the way people behave in different circumstances. Or, to be brutal, how they behave to their social betters versus their social inferiors.

Bob Phillips (**Leon Ockenden**) is having an affair with Fiona Foster (**Caroline Langrishe**), the wife of his boss Frank (**Robert Daws**). As a cover story Fiona has said she was counselling Mary Featherstone (**Sara Crowe**), in a crisis due to her husband William (**Matthew Cottle**) having an affair. Coincidentally Bob’s covering story for his wife Teresa (**Charlie Brooks**) involves a drinking session with William who, he claims, is in a state due his wife cheating on him.

Ayckbourn is, of course, a master of plotting. And the mechanism of the plot is very finely crafted indeed. But the play isn’t just about making its cast jump through hoops: it’s perhaps finer that *Relatively* in the that it makes you feel for its characters. Mary ‘the mouse’ is, in some respects, a comic stereotype yet Crowe’s wounded dignity when she demands an apology from her husband is quietly heartbreaking.

The writer casts something of a jaundiced eye over everyone. Cottle’s William is toe-curlingly servile to his boss. But worse than that is his treatment of Mary, a woman who he believes he has made – he’s bettered her by introducing her to non-fiction works of literature, classical music and less awful clothes. In his idea of art and culture he bears more than a passing resemblance to Laurence Moss in Abigail’s Party with his leather-bound, yet steadfastly unread, Shakespeare.

There’s something pleasingly retro about the acting – especially in the depiction of classic English types which, presumably, no longer exist. Ockenden does lairy youth in a way which would give Robin Askwith a run for his money; Langrishe has the condescending grace of Penelope Keith and Daws is little short of magnificent as the upper management bod whose basic decency doesn’t prevent him from being a fool. Brooks’ Teresa is slightly harder to place – but her *Guardian* reading and love of Benjamin Britten imply a woman rebelling against middle-class respectability by marrying a member of the lower orders.

My one slight quibble is that the twist which ends the play doesn’t really make much sense. Despite this minor problem, *Other Half* is an example of Ayckbourn at his best.

Continues until Saturday 25 at the Theatre Royal, Brighton.

For more details and tickets click [here](http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/how-the-other-half-loves/theatre-royal-brighton/?ref=scenemag.co.uk).