How the Other Half Loves at The Old Vic

The Old Vic has announced that Roger Allam will star in a new production of Alan Ayckbourn’s classic comedy How the Other Half Loves, running from 29 July to 19 September 2026.

The production forms part of Artistic Director Matthew Warchus’s final In The Round Season at The Old Vic. Directed by Phillip Breen, it will also star Dorothy Atkinson, with the remaining cast to include Ayesha Antoine, Laura Elsworthy, Adam Gillen and Rowan Polonski.

First performed in 1969, How the Other Half Loves remains one of Ayckbourn’s most celebrated comedies, admired for its sharp construction, quick-fire misunderstandings and brilliantly choreographed domestic chaos. The play follows three married couples whose lives become increasingly entangled when Fiona Foster and Bob Phillips, each accused of having an affair by their spouses, use the unsuspecting Featherstones as an alibi. What begins as a convenient lie soon develops into a tightly woven farce of crossed wires, social awkwardness and escalating confusion.

The Old Vic describes the play as “three couples, two homes, one laugh-out-loud domestic farce,” and this new production will return Ayckbourn’s classic to the in-the-round staging for which it was originally written — a fitting setting for the play’s intricate timing and overlapping worlds.

Director Phillip Breen said, ‘Alan Ayckbourn is not only one of the English stage’s most brilliant comedians, but one of its great formal pioneers, too. How the Other Half Loves is the first time Ayckbourn plays around with theatre’s two essential building blocks, space and time — and the result is thrilling.’

How the Other Half Loves runs at The Old Vic from 29 July to 19 September 2026. Tickets are available via The Old Vic website.

Rehearsal images