Ayckbourn hides unpleasant truths under a shiny veneer of humour How the Other Half Loves Theatre Royal Bath

From the moment that Marsha Fitzalan, playing the adulterous suburban housewife Fiona Foster, flits across the stage in a pair of fluffy white mules and a long satin housecoat, it is clear that Alan Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves is - in part - a loving paean to the 1970s. Telephones with sliding dials, sherry before dinner and avocado starters are a few of the details carefully recreated in Paul Farnsworth's set. But this sly analysis of the marital state in the era of Pan's People is more than an exercise in nostalgia.

The Fosters, a posh couple, are presented alongside the Phillipses, an earnestly left-wing couple. This quartet is rounded out by a third pair, the fundamentally creepy and hopelessly maladjusted Featherstones. Mrs Foster is having an affair with Mr Phillips, but the lovers bring the Featherstones into the goings-on as a convenient pretext.

While the play did make me laugh, Ayckbourn's droll lines and Alan Strachan's silky direction don't half put the boot into the state of affairs. Affairs being the keyword, of course. While everyone is either actually doing it, or suspecting everyone else of doing it, adult life is rather fraught. Posh Fiona finds her other half a complete plonker, while Guardian-fixated Teresa Phillips (Claudia Elmhirst) gets the hots for her nasty, drunken hubby, Bob (Richard Stacey), only after he has smacked her around a bit. Chez Featherstone, William (Paul Kemp) treats Mary (Amanda Royle) in turn like a disobedient child or a badly trained pet. He smacks her on the hand when she disobeys him, and orders her to "Sit" on arrival at the Fosters' dinner party, as if she were the Blue Peter dog.

Ayckbourn is always at his best when drawing attention to the cellulite on the rump of Middle England, and here he does not disappoint. Frank Foster (Nicholas le Provost) may be genteel enough to find it necessary to call loo roll "bathroom stationery", but he is not brave enough to sit down and really get to grips with the froideur at the heart of his marriage, while Teresa Phillips, a young mother forever writing unpublished letters to the Guardian about global wrongs, is blind to the domestic indifference that has beset her home.

The dramatic twist is that the world of the Fosters and the world of the Phillipses operate at the same time, in the same set. The Fosters' wallpapered drawing room and the Phillipses' badly painted lounge are presented simultaneously, the conversations dovetailing in and out of one another. It's a bit like watching one of those films where two different scenes are played out at once, the screen cut in half by a vertical line. The dinner-party scene takes this conceit to giddy heights. For two different parties on two separate nights, the settings are woven so carefully together that spilt soup in one house must double up for a leaking loo in the next. With its increasing undertow of violence and disgust, Ayckbourn's double supper makes Abigail's Party, another period charmer with suburban folk in maxi dresses, look like a picnic.

Strachan has assembled a cast able to carry off the stiff challenge of the twin sets, but it is le Provost who holds the night. White-quiffed and goggle-eyed, he dispenses kindly advice and dry sherry in equal doses. His attempt to get an emotional handle on life is as disastrous as his attempt to get fit in the living room, but his honesty and fundamental decency shine out above the grim existence of the other couples, and not least the mealy-mouthed mendacity of his wife, who is too busy humping the "office Romeo" to remember about their wedding anniversary.

The play is neither true farce nor knockabout comedy, but conceals enough disagreeable human truths under a bright canopy of humour to make for a satisfyingly uncomfortable night.

Ends 25 August; on tour thereafter. For further info and booking details visit: www.theatreroyal.org.uk

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