Theatrical snobs still patronise Alan Ayckbourn. Alan Strachan’s cleverly orchestrated revival of his second big hit, first seen in Scarborough in 1969, reminds us just what a comic master Ayckbourn is. He combines technical ingenuity with perceptive comments on class and marriage, that remain shockingly undated, even in our supposedly egalitarian society.
Ayckbourn plays games with space and time. He overlaps two distinct households: one, the posh, upper-class Fosters; the other, the messy, middle-class Phillipses.
In the play’s most famous scene, Ayckbourn ups the ante by showing the hapless Featherstones, used as alibis to cover an adulterous fling between Fiona Foster and Bob Phillips, being invited to dinner by each family on successive nights. The joke is that both parties are shown in the same theatrical time with the Featherstones swivelling between the two events. The result is every bit as hilarious as the scene in Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters where the hero finds himself madly trying to dispense two meals simultaneously.
Without a hint of didacticism, Ayckbourn shrewdly observes the links between sex and status. Nicholas Le Prevost, very funny as Frank Foster, camouflages his disappointment with his marriage to his svelte, hard-bitten wife (Jenny Seagrove) with calculated vagueness. Meanwhile, Tamzin Outhwaite as the socially militant Teresa Phillips, constantly writing angry letters to the Guardian, and Jason Merrells as her errant husband, settle their rancorous disputes through passionate lovemaking. But the prize pair are the Featherstones, who are forerunners of the lower middle-class Hopcrofts in Absurd Person Singular. Even if Gillian Wright slightly overplays Mary Featherstone’s initial catatonic terror, she is very touching in her ultimate rebellion. Matthew Cottle is also superb as her husband, a domestic little Hitler who is forever slapping his wife’s wrist and who, in the play’s most chilling line, asks: “Do you realise, Mrs Foster, the hours I’ve put into that woman?” Ayckbourn, the comic craftsman, emerges as British theatre’s most determined opponent of the eternal male bully.
• At Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London, until 25 June. Buy tickets at theguardianboxoffice.com or call 0330-333 6906.
