How The Other Half Loves at the Old Vic: Implausible and dated farce

How The Other Half Loves at the Old Vic: Implausible and dated farce

This Alan Ayckbourn revival is masterfully crafted but the years have not been kind

Alan Ayckbourn’s “How the Other Half Loves” at the Old Vic: Technically Brilliant if Rather Overlong and Old-Fashioned West End Farce

Is there a crisis in British new writing? The comparative paucity of new work in mainstream theatre is bad news for some UK playwrights, but good news for those whose back catalogues are graced with revivable gems. One such is Alan Ayckbourn, whose 90-strong oeuvre is absolutely stuffed with modern classics. So the Old Vic, already riding high due to its highly successful transfer of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, which finishes its run in the West End…

How the Other Half Loves - Old Vic, London

Writer: Alan Ayckbourn Director: Phillip Breen “That’s rather grotesque,” comments Fiona Foster as her husband Frank does his morning exercises in skimpy nylon shorts and royal blue tracksuit top. How the Other Half Loves, written by Alan Ayckbourn in 1969, is a theatrically playful farce, plotting the shifting dynamics of three interconnected couples. Its light-hearted [...] The post How the Other Half Loves – Old Vic, London appeared first on …

Review: How the Other Half Loves at Old Vic

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 mes…