How the Other Half Loves, Theatre Royal Haymarket

Alan Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves – first performed in 1969, in the round at the Library Theatre in Scarborough – was only his second play. Already, though, it has a few Ayckbourn tropes – warring couples and interconnecting sets – and concerns infidelity and the lies that couples tell each other (and themselves) to keep marriages alive.

The play is set ingeniously in Fiona and Frank Foster's and Teresa and Bob Phillips's living rooms, melded into one and differentiated by furniture and furnishings. This also being a play about class, it's obvious which bits are the former's and which the latter's. The Fosters have neutral colours, expensive sofas, a hallway and a pantry, while the Phillipses live in the mess caused by their young baby, and the furnishings are 1960s geometric patterns (in Julie Godfrey's striking design). The scenes in each home are rapidly intercut, which means the cast are often on stage with nothing to do with the scene being played by other actors. It requires superb timing, which the cast manage effortlessly.

Bob works for Frank, who is gloriously unaware that his colleague is having an affair with Fiona. When their partners become suspicious, Bob and Fiona cast William and Mary Featherstone as fictitious alibis. William is the boring, nasal accountant at the same company and Mary his mousey wife – and when they are invited to dinner on successive nights at the homes of the other couples, it all starts to unravel. Ayckbourn's masterstroke is to have the dinner parties play out simultaneously, with William and Mary swivelling in their seats to play guests at two different tables on two different nights.

A programme note tells us that the play was blighted by being considered a farce, but would that director Alan Strachan (and old Ayckbourn hand) had played it so here. For then there might be some verve, or even just the odd bit of pace, rather than the rather dreary evening I sat through, barely laughing once.

I am normally a great fan of Ayckbourn and his deeply humane and intelligent writing, which can be deliciously subtle when it needs to be among some broader comedy elements. But in this production, the script seems like a museum piece, with references to avocados being exotic and remarks men make about women being built for housework or bad at maths that don't wash – even ironically – in 2016. Some of the lines are painful to hear, as they now don't sound simply sexist (as indeed they were in 1969), but horribly misogynistic. By presenting it as comedy drama, rather than fast-paced farce, Strachan's approach means lines jump out as painfully dated rather than being lost in the mirth that should ensue – and indeed normally does ensue with Ayckbourn.

Jenny Seagrove nicely conveys Fiona's glacial superiority, while Nicholas Le Prevost is excellent as the bumbling, stumbling Frank. Tamzin Outhwaite is appealing as the women's libber (I did say it's dated) and Jason Merrells is suitably boorish as the arrogant Bob. Matthew Cottle and Gillian Wright (pictured above), meanwhile, bring depth to the rather cartoonish William and Mary, neatly parlaying the nasty undertones of their relationship: “The hours I've put into that woman!” William says of Mary at one point. On a night when the wrongdoers aren't punished, at least this mouse roars by the end.