How the Other Half Loves

When Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves hit the London stage in 1970, critics hailed the event as a godsend to English light comedy “that can keep audiences chuckling happily for two hours, without insulting their intelligence.” Though a direct descendant of drawing room farces, à la Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward, the play was, and remains, decidedly modern in its portrayal of three couples floundering about amid social conventions and misunderstandings.