What a contrast! There is little to chuckle about in the first act of Alan Ayckbourn’s If I Were You, but after the interval there are laughs aplenty.

Unhappy couple Jill (Liza Goddard) and Mal (Jack Ellis) suddenly change bodies, and spend the second act trying to hide the switch from their family and his workmates.

Liza is excellent, first as a depressed, haggard wife and then inheriting the characteristics of her male chauvinist husband, complete with masculine body language.

Jack also impresses as he changes from cheating, belching, short-tempered husband Mal to a caring, fussy woman.

But Ayckbourn, whose play premiered eight months after he suffered a stroke in 2006, makes us sit through an entire first-half set-up of domestic drudgery before the comedy kicks in.

Surely producer Bill Kenwright and director Joe Harmston could have saved us from some of the mundane dialogue and domestic tasks performed by the wife?

However, there are two interesting sub-plots. Mal is concerned that their sensitive son Sam (David Osmond) wants to become an actor, and Jill is alarmed that their daughter Chrissie (Lauren Drummond) is being knocked about in her marriage to Mal’s furnishing store assistant manager Dean (Ayden Callaghan).