HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES. To 21 February.
Hornchurch.
HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES
by Alan Ayckbourn.
Queen’s Theatre To 21 February 2009.
Tue-Sat 8pm Mat 21 Feb 2.30pm
Audio-described 21 Feb 2.30pm.
BSL Signed 18 Feb.
Runs 2hr 25min One interval.
TICKETS: 01708 443333.
www.queens-theatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 17 February.
Some halves stronger than others in genial Ayckbourn revival.
For once, it seemed likely Bob Carlton’s Hornchurch company of actor-musicians cut to the chase couldn’t find a musical element. There's none, surely, in this early Alan Ayckbourn comedy, set in 1972, when it was enjoying its first London run. But music will out at Hornchurch - director Matt Devitt screens the year’s Eurovision Song Contest before shows and between scenes.
A theatre resorting to a 37-year old Eurovision Contest might be thought desperate. But the adverts are included, with chimps, penguins and singing housewife, plus Dorset and Dvorak combining to promote Hovis, providing a quaint period context for Ayckbourn’s deadly sharp depiction of suburban strains. Famously, the simultaneously depicted upper and lower bourgeois living-rooms, tasteful affluence interleaved with messy aspiration, reflect the two households where anger, tedium and contempt underlie most of the relationships.
It’s a world that, as the sixties end (Other Half was first seen in Scarborough during 1969), hasn’t changed that much. Company boss Frank Foster can still expect his management to come in early at a moment’s notice, though he can’t get anything to work at home. Politically-aware young Teresa Phillips writes letters to the press but has no impact on anything. Meanwhile, the lies underlying the relationships spread to involve the Featherstones, whose marriage stays rock-solid only because neither has any momentum.
This, married to ingeniously-plotted jokes and a set-piece scene where the simultaneous events in the two rooms combine with a telescoping of two meals from different days, provides enough to satisfy even in a production where some performances are over-deliberate, playing the line rather than the character, and where a few things misfire: the point about Teresa and the press, or the moment when Mary asserts finally herself – what can be the play’s biggest laugh passes for nothing here. And a pram stands in for Ayckbourn’s carry-cot.
Still, there’s good work from Stuart Organ’s bemused Frank, forever asking questions and perpetually sidetracking himself so he learns nothing, while Lucy Thackeray’s realistically lively as the sharp-witted Teresa and Simon Jessop gives the quietly appalling William a credible mix of domestic bully and subservient employee.
Fiona Foster: Kim Ismay.
Teresa Phillips: Lucy Thackeray.
Frank Foster: Stuart Organ.
Bob Phillips: Sam Kordbacheh.
William Featherstone: Simon Jessop.
Mary Featherstone: Lindsay Ashworth.
Director: Matt Devitt.
Designer: Norman Coates.
Lighting: Andy Lewis.
2009-02-18 09:28:00