HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES To 3 October.
Newcastle-under-Lyme/Bowness-on-Windermere.
HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES
by Alan Ayckbourn.
New Vic Newcastle-under-Lyme To 19 September
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 19 Sept 2.15pm.
Audio-described 16 Sept.
Captioned 15 Sept.
Talkback: 15 Sept.
then The Old Laundry Bowness-on-Windermere 28 September-3 October 2009.
Mon-Sat 8pm.
Runs 2hr 30min One interval.
TICKETS: 01782 717962.
www.newvictheatre.org.uk (Newcastle-under-Lyme).
015394 88444 ext 223 (Bowness-on-Windermere).
Review: Timothy Ramsden 3 September.
Philandering fun and fury with the Fosters, Phillips and Featherstones.
A mere forty years on, Alan Ayckbourn has revived his second comic success. Though his dramas have taken wider and more serious turns since, the author treats this comparative trifle on its own delightful terms.
He, and designer for the round Jan Bee Brown, remind how lightly the play creates its most obvious theatrical device of two contrasting living-rooms simultaneously onstage - the play’s many proscenium-arch productions have sometimes overlaid the action with design contrasts.
Ayckbourn’s comedy is almost devoid of gratuitous comic effort, flowing from the characters and their situation. There’s only one line (about a drink) that seems stuck-in by the author for a laugh.
It has the opposite dynamic from his previous success Relatively Speaking, where an older man and the young woman who had been his employee had a secret affair. Here the amatory pair are the boss’s wife and a younger, married executive in her husband's company.
And contrasting the earlier play’s sustained cross-purpose dialogue and increasingly open secret, Ayckbourn creates here a busy maze of action. It bustles along as the cover-up spreads to involve a dull couple who find themselves invited to two dinner parties, famously played simultaneously with increasingly fast editing. In both plays the secret seeps out, and in both the final moments show the innocent parties taking a quietly satisfactory revenge.
Marilyn Cutts catches Fiona’s false brightness and equally put-on repentance, plus her few moments of surprise, while seasoned Ayckbournite Robert Austin has an apt sense of earnest distraction as her husband. The guileless Featherstones, who bring their own marital tensions to the comic feast, are caught by Ian McLarnon, obedient employee and pettily bossy husband, and Anna Lowe as his put-upon, but not put-down Scottish wife.
It’s only with the Phillips doubt creeps in; Rosie Jenkins rightly doesn’t accentuate Teresa’s late-sixties radical credentials (there’d have been no need to do so at the time) but Theo Cross as Bob seems too often to force lines that remain acted rather than absorbed into a credible character. Still, this is an Other Half to like a lot if not quite entirely love.
Frank Foster: Robert Austin.
Fiona Foster: Marilyn Cutts.
Bob Phillips: Theo Cross.
Teresa Phillips: Rosie Jenkins.
William Featherstone: Ian McLarnon.
Mary Featherstone.: Anna Lowe.
Director: Alan Ayckbourn.
Designer: Jan Bee Brown.
Lighting: Jason Taylor.
Fight director: Kate Waters.
2009-09-09 11:35:33