Roger Allam and Dorothy Atkinson led Alan Ayckbourn’s breakthrough 1969 farce How the Other Half Loves at The Old Vic, restored to the in-the-round staging it was written for.
Roger Allam and Dorothy Atkinson led How the Other Half Loves, Alan Ayckbourn’s 1969 farce, at The Old Vic in Waterloo from Wednesday 29 July to Saturday 19 September 2026. Phillip Breen directed the revival.
Ayckbourn wrote the play for his own company at the Library Theatre in Scarborough, where it opened under his direction on 31 July 1969. Two dinner parties, held by different couples on different evenings, share one set and run at the same time. The Featherstones, invited to both, shuttle between them as the audience follows two timelines the characters never see.
The play transferred to the Lyric Theatre in the West End in 1970 and ran more than two years with Robert Morley, then reached Broadway. It came three years after Relatively Speaking, Ayckbourn’s first hit, and confirmed him as a mainstream success.
He went on to write 91 full-length plays. From 1972 to 2009 he ran the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of them premiered.
For this production The Old Vic converted its whole auditorium to seating in the round. It restored the staging Ayckbourn built the play around.