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Alan Ayckbourn is an admirably prolific master craftsman of the stage but his comedies don’t make me laugh. The Scarborough-based Bard of bourgeois discomfiture has penned 91 plays and won seven Evening Standard theatre awards in 87 years but the new works and revivals that reach London these days seem contrived. Philip Breen’s production of this 1969 farce about infidelity and misapprehension, with its intricately overlapping locations and timelines, is a case in point.
It’s meticulously plotted and executed, elegantly staged in the round as originally conceived, and coasts successfully on the comic timing of Dorothy Atkinson and Roger Allam (still silkily hilarious despite fluffing his lines several times on opening night). It’s also wildly implausible and dated. I found myself smiling thinly amid belly-laughers.
