Peter Viney's Blog

By Alan Ayckbourn

Wiltshire Creative
Directed by Gareth Machin
Designer Michael Taylor

Salisbury Playhouse
Saturday 18th February 2023 7.30 pm

CAST

Rebecca Cooper- Mary Featherstone
Sam Alexander – William Featherstone
Sherry Baines – Fiona Foster
Philip Bretherton – Frank Foster
Haydn Oakley- Bob Phillips
Joanna Van Kampen – Teresa Phillips

Back to Salisbury Playhouse. It’s been a long time. It’s a particularly well-designed theatre (1976) with spacious rows- you don’t have to stand to let people pass.The seats have a good rake. It sounds and looks good from everywhere in the house. Above all it’s also an active producing theatre. For direction, cast, set, costume – for what’s happening on stage, it is as good as any West End Theatre. It’s just more comfortable, with a better stage and more pleasant all round with decent facilities. It was good to be back there.

This is the third time Salisbury Playhouse has done the play (previously in 1973 and 1986). We saw a previous one, which I discovered when sorting are several boxes of theatre programmes recently, but I had zero recall, so it was all fresh. Salisbury have done thirty-seven Acykbourn plays since they opened, a neatly Shakespearean number, though Ayckbourn is far ahead of the bard, now on his 88th play. They are numbered too. How The Other Half Loves is #9 of 88 then, first performed in Scarborough in 1969. They’ve tweaked the dates here, as 1953 is mentioned as 19 years earlier, so it’s 1972, and we get the appropriate 70s music before and in the interval. The set is right. The costumes are right. The creation of 1972 is very much part of this revival production, giving it an added dimension of interest it could not have had at the time. Nostalgia’s an industry. Twenty or thirty years ago, I used to see theatre audiences, often elderly, wallowing in nostalgia for Noel Coward. For my generation, 70s Ayckbourn fulfils the same function.

From Ayckbourn’s website:

Short Synopsis: Notable for its composite set of two over-laid living rooms allowing for simultaneous action in two places, How The Other Half Loves centres on three couples. Fiona Foster and Bob Philips are having an illicit affair unbeknownst to each other’s partners and their cover-story involves them helping an unaware third couple, the Featherstones, leading to farcical misunderstandings and events.

It’s close to Whitehall farce conceptually, though no trousers fall down, and no one hides in a cupboard or under a bed, or at all. Most Ayckbourn p[lays have some original piece of staging and in this it’s that the set, we come to realise, is actually two different rooms that meld and link. The chintzy wallpaper, and antique repro furniture belongs to Frank and Fiona Foster. They’re older and richer, and Frank is the other two mens’ boss. In 1972 he’s the absent minded professor / boss with his mind too far in the clouds to remember domestic details, though in 2023 we might class such inability to recall any detail as early onset dementia. In 1972, it’s merely funny.

The yellow and orange cheap room which is in bits between the chintz, is Bob and Teresa Phillips home, and they have a baby, just out of shot, and are younger in … well, I can only describe the clothes by saying that as young teachers in the era, we wore very similar. They’re the late 60s / 70s generation. Untidy house, young baby, crisps on the floor, a bit squalid. They’re slobbish. Bob is a bully and a philanderer Teresa is an exhausted young mum.

The third couple, Mary and William Featherstone, are the conventional accountant / bank clerk types who have totally missed the 60s / 70s era, in spite of being the same age as the Phillips. William is Mr Boring as well as Mr Dominating and the nervous Mary is ‘Mary the Mouse.’

You could sum it up as Upper Middle Class Fosters, university / college educated Phillips, lower-middle class without degrees Featherstones. Yes. Much of the comedy comes from class. It’s 1972. It did.

The genius of the play is that in Act One we are simultaneously in the Foster’s house and the Phillips house on one set. Even the sofa is divided into a chintz half and an orange half, which they adhere too. The two phones are on the same table. The Fosters have a cream dial phone. The Phillips have a grey / green trimphone, which my generation thought really cool.

In SceneTwo, having come to realize we are in two places at the same time on the same set, we have to move on to two dinner parties, Fosters on Thursday, Phillips on Friday. The Featherstones are guests at both. The tables cross over (polished oak / stripped pine) and with masterly timing, William and Mary are interacting in both dinner parties at the same time. in different places on different days I won’t say how the worlds come together.

Scene three and four (Act Two) would involve plot spoilers, and I won’t.

It relies on a first rate cast with superb comic timing, and here it has it. They’re all brilliant in their roles. The roles are big, fun for actors to get their teeth into. Mary, who has fewer words but exudes trepidation and terror is a great performance by Rebecca Cooper. Every move and gesture brought smiles.

All the men are domestic tyrants. All think simple chores are women’s work. It parades the sexism of the era. The women react differently too. Older, wealthier Fiona handles it, man manages. Mrs Phillips is worn, trampled on, but fights back, physically fights back, then resolves in physically between the sheets. Mary is cowed as she’s bullied into supposed upward mobility by William.

On the title, How the Other Half LOVES, Michael Billington sums it up. Again from Ayckbourn’s site:

Ayckbourn, permanently preoccupied with marriage, here extends and develops his treatment of it by showing the different ways of treating adulterous flings: with benign neglect, angry retaliation, do-gooding interference. How you react, he suggests in this thoughtful romp, is likely to depend on such staples of English life as class, income, education and emotional training.”
(Michael Billington: Modern Dramatists – Alan Ayckbourn, 1983, Macmillan)

I loved every acting performance. I’m a curmudgeonly Ayckbourn nay-sayer of old, but this was a definite four star version of a play that was better than I remembered.

****

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

ALAN AYCKBOURN ON THIS BLOG

Women in Mind by Alan Ayckbourn, Chichester Festival Theatre, 2022
Communicating Doors by Alan Ayckbourn, Menier Chocolate Factory, 2015
Neighbourhood Watch by Alan Ayckbourn, Stephen Joseph Company, Bath Theatre Royal, 2012
Way Upstream by Alan Ayckbourn, Salisbury Playhouse, 2011
The Norman Conquests by Alan Ayckbourn, Chichester 2017
– Living Together
– Table Manners
– Round and Round The Garden

GARETH MACHIN (Director)

The Worst Wedding Ever, Salisbury 2017
Hedda Gabler, Salisbury
The Magna Carta Plays, Salisbury
Little Shop of Horrors, Salisbury
Separate Tables, Salisbury
The Recruiting Officer, Salisbury
The Spire, Salisbury

SAM ALEXANDER
The Watsons, by Laura Wade, Chichester 2018
Racing Demon, by David Hare, Bath 2017
Love’s Labour’s Won (Much Ado About Nothing), RSC 2014, Stratford (Don John)
Much Ado About Nothing (Love’s Labour’s Won), RSC at Chichester, 2016 (Don John)
Love’s Labour’s Lost, RSC 2014 (King of Navarre)
Love’s Labour’s Lost, RSC at Chichester 2016 (King of Navarre)

JOANNA VAN KAMPEN
Murder On The Orient Express, Chichester 2022
An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde, Classic Spring 2018
The Magna Carta Plays, Salisbury, 2015

SHERRY BAINES
Before The Party by Rodney Ackland, Salisbury 2017

PHILIP BRETHERTON
Before The Party by Rodney Ackland, Salisbury 2017

HAYDN OAKLEY
Women on The Edge of A Nervous Breakdown,2015