I’ve managed to locate a reference to Your Loving Wife (the retitled and rewritten UK production of The Honeys) in the archive of The Nottingham Evening News.
October 2, 1956
From This Week’s Shows:
THEATRE ROYAL: “Your Loving Wife.” —Even more ruthless than “Arsenic and Old Lace,” this new “charnel-house” comedy by the American short story writer Roald Dahl brings to Nottingham a trio of West End comediennes. These are Hermione Baddeley, star of many barbed revues and plays of diverse types, Joyce Barbour and Agnes Lauchlan. As the fashionable “Nellie Fleishman,” Miss Barbour has become the envy of her two friends, “Mrs. Curtis Honey” and “Mrs. Boris Honey,” ever since her husband departed this life via a window, leaving “his loving wife” a million or more dollars. How devoutly they wish that their two spouses, mirthfully doubled by Meredith Edwards, would also shuffle off this mortal coll. Perhaps (with a little assistance, of course) they might do so, reflect the two wives. And things begin to happen. The hypochondriac “Boris” finds himself unaccountably unable to escape from his patent turkish bath. The gormandizing “Curtis” discovers that his oysters have disagreed with him. But they survive these tribulations. What happens next it is, perhaps, not fair to reveal. Our author shows great fertility of invention, and Hermione Baddeley displays brilliantly her well-known capacity for pointing her lines. It is not so much what she says, but the way she says it. The most simple phrases reveal hidden meanings. And the whole house roars with laughter. Both the opening and closing scenes of the play are in what is known in the United States as “a rumpus room.” There would be more than a rumpus if such things happened here as happen there! The “signature tune” of Mr. Dahl’s comedy, which has been directed by Gerald Savory (of “George and Margaret” renown), is, appropriately enough. from “The Merry Widow! Only recently produced, the piece has yet to be seen in London. But Emile Littler and Tom Arnold, who are jointly responsible for its presentation, need have little fear of its reception, judging from last night’s laughter. —W.B.S.