How do you make a farce with no doors? This was the challenge Alan Ayckbourn set himself in 1979 with Taking Steps. His solution: locate the action on three separate floors of one house – and locate all three floors on one level (this explains the, at first peculiar-seeming, jumble of beds and sofas of Kevin Jenkins’s design). Have two sets of banisters marking two imaginary staircases. Give the action a slow, steady start until the audience twigs what is what and who is where. Then let the fun begin. One instance: in a first-floor bedroom a woman (Louise Shuttleworth) practises dance steps. In the ground-floor drawing room below stand the husband she means to leave (Russell Dixon) and the builder (Leigh Symonds) from whom the couple rent this supposedly haunted house. The men look upwards, wondering what is making the noise – they think they are alone. In reality, what we actually see on the stage is a woman jumping up and down between two men. Plaster falls from the imaginary ceiling. The audience howls. This is the extra level, the one without which no Ayckbourn play is complete: the complicity of the audience in the game of make-believe. In Scarborough’s theatre-in-the-round, we can all see one another watching the action – some are seated so close they are virtually in the action – we share the pleasure of “seeing” what is not there.
Ayckbourn describes Taking Steps as his only really classic farce. In a collapsing house, relationships are falling apart. Four selfish characters get their just deserts, two deserving characters get theirs. On the night I was there, the clockwork mechanism of the construction seemed to turn just a little too slowly to release the gales of laughter that famously accompanied the first production, but the ensemble (including Laurence Pears as the wife’s brother; Laura Matthews as his former fiancee; and the delightful Antony Eden as the husband’s tongue-twisted solicitor) are finely tuned by the director: Alan Ayckbourn.
