ROWNTREE Players will be using the set from last year’s revival of How The Other Half Loves at the Stephen Joseph Theatre when staging Alan Ayckbourn’s comedy in York.

So the swivel chairs for the overlapping dinner-party scene will be spinning once more, this time on the proscenium-arch stage of Joseph Rowntree Theatre rather than the theatre-in-the round design of the Scarborough theatre.

“Staging this piece has many problems because the set is so integral to the play,” says director John Hall. “The Stephen Joseph pieces are just one part of our production, simply because their set was in ‘the round’ so our team is having to create a full scenic backing to the piece as well.”

The differences in shape have not proved insurmountable, but John’s production will differ from Ayckbourn’s 2009 show in one noticeable respect.

“One of the difficulties I’ve found is that Alan Ayckbourn very rigidly says it’s set in 1969, but I’ve taken it forward to the Eighties, and I think it still works, with the restrictions of the phone systems of the time,” says John.

“I felt that that 1969 or the 1970s would have made it a period piece, whereas the Eighties are more accessible, so it’s not stuck in the original period. I suppose in 1969 the play would have been more risqué, but I can relate better to the Eighties.”

Written in 1969, Ayckbourn’s dinner-party comedy depicts three suburban married couples linked by the work of the husbands.

Fiona and Frank Foster are the executive couple; Bob and Teresa Phillips are attractive and on the rise, although she is an utter slob and he is a total bore; while the third pair, William and Mary Featherstone, are socially hopeless and deadly earnest too, alas.

The respective roles go to company newcomers Steve Tearle and Emma O’Connell, Martyn Hunter and wife Jeanette Hunter, and another Rowntree debutant, Adam Sowter, and Clare Horsley, in a play where Ayckbourn’s unforgettable comic device is to overlap two dinner parties given on consecutive nights.

“We started rehearsals with that dinner-party scene as it’s the one scene that involves the whole cast and needs slickness,” says John.

“The other thing we’ve done is get the set early from Scarborough, so that we could have a week of tech rehearsals with it, where the cast can get used to the swivel chairs and tables.”

John, who saw last summer’s production at the SJT, is enjoying the multiple challenges of mounting Ayckbourn’s comedy.

“I’ve never known a play with so many props: food, crockery, newspapers, it just goes on – and Bob and Teresa Phillips’s house is so full of clutter, with someone out of control on the edge of depression,” he says.

And then there are the words, so many words.

“You can’t cut them so it comes down delivering it right. It just needs playing in a certain way, but it’s two-and-a half hours divided between six players, so it’s been a mammoth task learning it,” says John.

• Rowntree Players present How The Other Half Loves at Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, from Wednesday to Saturday, 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or 01904 416751.