Ayckbourn's How The Other Half Loves Opens at the Old Vic in Warchus's Final Season
Alan Ayckbourn's 1969 comedy How The Other Half Loves is running at the Old Vic in a revival directed by Phillip Breen, starring Roger Allam and Dorothy Atkinson. The production plays from 29 July to 19 September 2026 and forms part of outgoing artistic director Matthew Warchus's final season at the London theatre (WhatsOnStage).
Allam plays Frank Foster, with Atkinson as his wife Fiona. The cast also includes Ayesha Antoine as Teresa, Rowan Polonski as Bob, Adam Gillen as William Featherstone and Laura Elsworthy as Mary (WhatsOnStage). Rob Howell designed the set. Production photography is by Manuel Harlan (Old Vic).
The play's signature trick is structural. Two households hold dinner parties on the same evening, and the staging overlaps them using crossed-over tables, so characters appear to be at both dinners at once. It is a device that asks the audience to hold two conversations in their head simultaneously — Ayckbourn wrote it 57 years ago, and it remains one of his most ingenious constructions.
This revival stages the play in the round, with the audience seated on all sides of the action (Old Vic). The Old Vic, a 200-year-old theatre on London's South Bank, typically seats around 1,067 in its standard configuration; in-the-round stagings reconfigure the floor and reduce that capacity somewhat.
Allam is a familiar face at the Old Vic and across British theatre. In a recent interview he recalled an early job for Ayckbourn in which he played a testicle — a detail that speaks to the long professional relationship between actor and playwright (WhatsOnStage). Allam is widely known for roles in Endeavour, Cabaret and the original London cast of Les Misérables.
Warchus's final Old Vic season, announced in June, also includes the musical Martin Guerre, a return of A Christmas Carol, and a production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia at the Duke of York's Theatre in the West End (WhatsOnStage). Warchus has led the Old Vic as artistic director since 2015, succeeding Kevin Spacey.
The Old Vic offers access performances for its productions, including audio description, British Sign Language interpretation, captioning and relaxed performances — the last designed for audience members who benefit from a less formal theatre environment.
For audiences, the appeal is straightforward: a durable farce by one of Britain's most prolific living playwrights, staged with a cast led by one of the country's most reliable comic actors, in the final months of a well-regarded artistic directorship. The dinner-party overlap remains the reason to see it — the moment when two sets of guests share a stage and the audience has to work out which table everyone is really sitting at.
