Taking Steps
| Taking Steps | |||
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| Written by | Alan Ayckbourn | ||
| Characters | Elizabeth Roland Mark Tristram Leslie Kitty |
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| Date premiered | 28 September 1979 | ||
| Place premiered | Stephen Joseph Theatre (Westwood site), Scarborough | ||
| Original language | English | ||
| Subject | Relationships, farce | ||
| Setting | Three floors of an old house | ||
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| Ayckbourn chronology | |||
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Taking Steps is a 1979 farce by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. It is set on three floors of an old and reputedly haunted house, with the stage arranged so that the stairs are flat and all three floors are on a single level (hence the play on words in the title).
There are six characters in the play:
The play is set in a dilapidated Victorian three-storey country house, reputedly a former bordello and said to be haunted by a deceased prostitute. According to the set design favoured by the author, all three floors are represented on stage at a single level, with the actors' movements between the floors expressed through mimed movement up and down flat staircases. This means that the downstairs living room, upstairs master bedroom and attic bedroom all occupy the same level, with actors frequently next to each other when their characters are on different floors in the story. (Stage exits lead to other off-stage rooms.)
Unlike most of Ayckbourn's plays, which are written for the round but are easily adapted for the proscenium, Taking Steps is generally considered to be a play that only works effectively in the round. While the original Stephen Joseph Theatre production was staged this way, the subsequent West End transfer was an end-stage performance, which was considered by Ayckbourn to compromise the effectiveness of the three-floor setting. As a result, the eventual transfer to Broadway in 1991 and the return to London in 2010 both used theatres in the round. (There is also said to have been an end-stage production of Taking Steps that actually did create a three-storey house on stage.)
The play takes place over two acts, both with continuous action. The first act takes place one evening, and the second act takes place the following morning.
Taking Steps was premièred at the Stephen Joseph Theatre (then at its old Westwood site) in Scarborough on 28 September 1979 with the following cast:
The production team were:
Ayckbourn reportedly had reservations about transferring the production to the West End, due to concerns of overexposure, doubts that a cast with high-profile names would be as effective as the ensemble casts normally used at Scarborough, and partly a feeling that West End audiences were used to his earlier comic plays and not his newer darker plays. However, Ayckbourn's regular producer Michael Codron persuaded him to go ahead with a London production. Following the lack of success of the West End productions of Ten Times Table and Joking Apart, Michael Codron did not allow Ayckbourn to direct Taking Steps, and instead brought in Michael Rudman, then Peter Hall's deputy at the National Theatre. The play opened at the Lyric Theatre on 2 September 1980 with the following cast:
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