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by Alan Ayckbourn, directed by Jeremy Webb

Thousand Islands Playhouse, Springer Theatre, Gananoque

May 31-June 22, 2025

Frank: “A team that plays together stays together”

Thousand Islands Playhouse is presenting How the Other Half Loves, the 1969 farce that shot Alan Ayckbourn to fame. It is one of Ayckbourn’s early experiments in representing time and space on stage, and it still comes over as ingenious and exciting. The TIP production is well cast, well designed and well directed and serves as a fine example of how a farce ought to be played.

When you enter the Springer Playhouse and begin to study the set designed by Vickie Marston, you will be struck by a number of peculiarities. The back wall of the set, depicting a combined living room and dining room, alternates between brown-stained wood and diagonal swaths of flowery wallpaper gone fuzzy where it meets the stained wood. There are two doors of the same size right next to each other upstage centre. The one stage right is white and surrounded by molding while the one stage left is plain without molding and matches the brown-stained wood. The stage right half of the set looks, in general, like a tidy, expensively furnished living-room, whereas the stage left half looks like a messy, cheaply furnished dining room. Each side features a very strange table. In front of the sofa stage right is a coffee table that is half in traditional style, half in modern. In the dining room stage left is a dining table with eight legs – four traditional, four modern.

As we discover soon after the action begins, the set represents the living room/dining room of two distinct couples – the wealthy Frank and Fiona Foster and the not-so-wealthy Bob and Terry Phillips. Frank turns out to be Bob’s boss. The Fosters tend to stay stage right and the Phillipses stage left, but it is clear when Frank and Bob sit on the same sofa but do not acknowledge each other’s presence that Ayckbourn has deliberately blended the abodes of the Fosters and Phillipses to great theatrical effect.

Besides being a farce, the play is also a game that Ayckbourn is playing with the audience. If two characters are on stage together and do not acknowledge each other’s presence, then we know they are in difference houses. If they do acknowledge each other’s presence, then we know they are in the same house. To know which of the two houses it is, we have to remember which of the central doors they entered through. If it was the white door, they are in the Fosters’ home. If it was the brown wooden door, they are in the Phillipses’ home.

To stage the play properly requires that all the blocking be minutely choreographed. That is what director Jeremey Webb does expertly and his six-member cast carries out his scheme flawlessly. Technically, the action is a marvel to behold.

But there is more to the play than Ayckbourn’s conceit of two residences occupying the same space. We learn that on Wednesday night Fiona stayed out until 2 am. She claims she was at here usual Wednesday night meeting, but Frank knows that she wasn’t. When he confronts Fiona with this fact, she claims she was out with Mary Featherstone, who kept her out late because she was so worried her husband was having an affair.

Meanwhile, Terry is upset that Bob was out until 2 am on Wednesday night leaving her alone with their baby. His excuse is that he was out so late because he was drinking and talking with William Featherstone, who works for the same company. We put two and two together long before Bob and Fiona’s spouses do that Bob and Fiona are having an affair. How Bob and Fiona can keep this a secret is the crux of the play. It is made particularly more difficult for them because William and Mary Feathersone have been invited to the Fosters for dinner on Thursday and to the Phillipses on Friday.

The climax of the play comes at the end of Act 1 when Ayckbourn, in a virtuoso flourish, stages the two dinner parties simultaneously at the same dining table. He thus superimposes not just the two locations but also the two times.

Staging the play, the director, the cast and most of the creative team are making their TIP debuts. They all work primarily in the Maritimes and one can only wonder why only now we are seeing the work of so many talented artists. David Christoffel is marvellous as Frank Foster, who is both pompous and forgetful without realizing he is either. Christoffel brings out all the humour in a man who is ready to pontificate about what people should do while not knowing how to do simple chores in his own house.

With Frank’s wife Fiona, Geneviève Steele gives a woman who has lived so long with her husband’s eccentricities that she just accepts them as a matter of course. Steele gives Fiona an outwardly brittle personality but ultimately has Fiona come across as smarter and infinitely more practical than Frank. Steele shows that Fiona feels no guilt over the affair. She simply doesn’t want to be found out.

Aaron Reid Ryder as Bob Phillips and Kait Post as his wife Terry make for a generally unhappy couple. Terry’s being stuck at home with a baby while Bob is at work has given her an excuse to let everything slide, including any upkeep of the house and herself. Post gives us the impression that Terry is very close to the breaking point right at the start of the play, finding Bob, the baby and the newspaper just about equally annoying. Post makes us join in Terry’s sense of triumph when Terry finally realizes Bob is having an affair and feels free to move on with her life.

Ryder makes see Bob as a man more ready to complain than help. Rydar intimates that Bob is in such a foul mood because of his guilt over the affair, while his foul mood only serves to worsen Terry’s mood and thus his own.

Matthew Gorman and Sophie Wilcott are well matched as William and Mary Featherstone, a couple that both the Fosters and the Phillipses consider incredibly dull. Neither one knows how to make conversation, but Mary is worse off because she is so aware of this fact. Gorman and Wilcot do succeed in mining all the comedy in such a socially awkward pair. Yet, as the play progresses, we see how William rather ungallantly expresses his superiority to Mary while unaware that both Frank and Bob view him as their inferior.

A bright note among this group of rather unpleasant characters is Mary. She seems totally hopeless at the beginning, but with time we are happy to see how she gains in confidence and even summons the courage to tell off the patronizing William.

Vickie Marston’s set is a constant delight and contains hidden features like the cleverest tabletop you’ve ever seen that can signal a shift of time and place through simple but ingenious means. Leigh Ann Vardy’s lighting is essential in a play like this for telling us where to look and helping us identify which of the two houses we are in. She also comically emphasizes the many scenes when two people speak to each other over the phone but are standing right next one other under the same spotlight. Kaelen MacDonald’s period costumes are a treat and will remind many in the audience what odd fashions people used to wear in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

How the Other Half Loves is not staged as often as some of Ayckbourn’s other plays, likely because of its technical requirements. To see those requirements so artfully fulfilled and to see a cast not only create memorable characters but navigate the complexities of Ayckbourn’s overlapping design so smoothly makes this production one that theatre-lovers should go out of their way to see. This production has introduced me to a whole new group of gifted actors and creatives more of whose fine work I look forward to enjoying.

Christopher Hoile

Photo: Geneviève Steele as Fiona and Aaron Reid Ryder as Bob; David Christoffel as Frank, Sophie Wilcott as Mary, Matthew Gorman as William, Kait Post as Terry (in foreground) and Geneviève Steele as Fiona. © 2025 James Paddle-Grant.

For tickets visit: www.1000islandsplayhouse.com.