"Dinner parties going adrift"

Alan Ayckbourn, one of whose 72 plays we watched on Sunday, How The Other Half Loves was first performed in Scarborough's small theatre-in-the-round, in July 1969. I lived in Scarborough in those days and knew the theatre, but I missed this première, and no wonder. I wouldn't have been interested in the subject (the play being a satire on middle class, British married couples and their awful 1960s dinner parties) and there were more momentous things for me to think about. The first men to walk on the moon had done so ten days previously and I had just left high school on a high note, so to speak, singing with the school choir in Germany, and was about to leave home to become a student at the University of London.

It's interesting to read about Alan Ayckbourn now, though. It looks as though his fascination with the ridiculous messes people get into because of their lies and adulteries might have stemmed from his "childhood experience of several unconventional relationships and an unhappy marriage," as the Wikipedia puts it. Poor fellow, all those bedroom farces might have been his attempt to laugh it off. A couple of decades after writing it, the playwright himself said about this particular play:

It all seems rather manic, and I thought the dialogue desperately heavy. I hope I've got a bit cleverer than that; it's not that I've abandoned humour, but I think perhaps there are more serious things to write about than dinner parties going adrift.

However he seems proud of his solution to a technical challenge: how to convey on stage simultaneously what was supposed to be happening in two different but similar places at two different times! The dinner party scene is particularly ingenious.

The Canadian actors at the Gladstone Theatre made a good stab at English accents and mannerisms, but unless you are English it's impossible to get the frantic artificiality exactly right.