YOU may have caught Alan Ayckbourn’s 40th anniversary revival of How The Other Half Loves at the Stephen Joseph Theatre last summer. If not, you can still see Jan Bee Brown’s furniture from that Scarborough production, now dusted down for further stage duty by the Rowntree Players this week in a John Hall production that shifts the setting from 1969 to the kitsch Seventies.

This is the play where Ayckbourn overlaps two houses: the neat, repro anonymity of the executive couple Fiona and Frank Foster and the hand-me-down necessities of new dad and mum, Bob and Teresa Phillips. They go about their business on the same stage, the sofa one half new and tidy, the other half worn and grubby.

In truth, the design sat rather better in The Round at the SJT; the Rowntree Theatre stage is rectangular and so there are moments where the couples seem unnaturally far apart, but you soon suspend such thoughts as Ayckbourn’s sophisticated brand of farcical drama takes over.

Not only the houses overlap, but so do the self-obsessed couples, because brash, selfish, play-away Bob (Steve Tearle) has been having some no-strings-attached extra-maritals with Fiona (Jeanette Hunter), the smart, independent but bored wife of Bob’s foggy-minded boss, Frank (Martyn Hunter).

Worn-out Teresa (Emma O’Connell) already has her suspicions, and Fiona and Bob’s under-rehearsed excuses for late-night absences from home are destined to hit the rocks when they drag quietly ambitious company accountant William Featherstone (Adam Sowter) and desperately timid wife Mary (Claire Horsley) into the mire.

The Featherstones end up being invited to dinner on successive nights, the two parties played concurrently with the aid of swivel chairs that instantly propel the hapless William and Mary from the Fosters’ formal dinner table to the Phillipses’ drunken mess. Sowter, who has more than a hint of Norman Wisdom in his mannerisms, is superb in this scene, as is Horsley’s startled, nervy mouse.

There is fun to be had from watching real-life husband and wife Martyn and Jeanette Hunter playing a married couple. Fine actors the pair of them, they savour the executive-class airs of Frank and Fiona, Martyn bringing out the boss’s bumbling naivety through stuttering vocal inflexions. Jeanette is better still, combining distance with pragmatism to mask a stymied marriage.

As the lies and misunderstandings mount amid an undercurrent of class division and rising Ayckbourn scepticism for the institution of marriage, so the comedy grows ever more frantic. The tone is well caught by Tearle’s enjoyably unlovable Bob and especially O’Connell, whose exasperated Teresa marks an impressive return to the stage for the Cottage Inn landlady after a 15-years gap.

Director John Hall had been looking to pick up the comedy’s pace in rehearsals and the fireworks could still spark more quickly, but nevertheless you will love both halves of How The Other Half Loves.

How The Other Half Loves, Rowntree Players, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, until tomorrow. Box office: 01904 623568/416751.