Taking Steps

Last updated

Taking Steps
Taking-steps.jpg
Written by Alan Ayckbourn
CharactersElizabeth
Roland
Mark
Tristram
Leslie
Kitty
Date premiered28 September 1979
Place premiered Stephen Joseph Theatre (Westwood site), Scarborough
Original languageEnglish
SubjectRelationships, farce
SettingThree floors of an old house
Official site
Ayckbourn chronology
Sisterly Feelings
(1979)
Suburban Strains
(1980)

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).

Contents

Characters

There are six characters in the play:

Setting

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.) It takes place in London.

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. [1] (There is also said to have been an end-stage production of Taking Steps that actually did create a three-storey house on stage. [2] )

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.

Productions

Scarborough première

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: [3]

The production team were:

London première

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. [1] 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. [4] The play opened at the Lyric Theatre on 2 September 1980 with the following cast: [3]

Ayckbourn was reportedly very unhappy with the London production, feeling both that the set, end-stage rather than in-the-round, did not work ("it looked a bit like a furniture store"), and that the director, Michael Rudman, had turned an ensemble farce into a star vehicle for Dinsdale Landon as Roland (in the process overshadowing what Ayckbourn viewed as the central role of Tristram). The opening night reception and the reviews were lukewarm. The production nonetheless ran for nine months, from 2 September 1980 to 6 June 1981. [5]

New York première

The play was eventually premièred on Broadway, over a decade after the UK première, at the Circle in the Square Theatre on 20 February 1991 with the following cast: [3]

The director was Alan Strachan. The play ran for two months, from 20 February to 28 April 1991. [6]

Other performances

Ayckbourn has revived the play himself on two occasions. In 1990, with a relatively short period after the ill-fated London production, it was revived at the Stephen Joseph Theatre with Ayckbourn directing again and Michael Gambon as Roland. [1] [4] It was further revived in 2010 at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, London, just over a year after Ayckbourn stepped down as Artistic Director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre. [1]

Taking Steps has also had numerous performances from other theatre companies. [7] It has also enjoyed success abroad; it was reported by The Stage that, with 462 performances, it was the most performed play in Germany in 1982. [1]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Ayckbourn</span> English playwright (born 1939)

Sir Alan Ayckbourn is a prolific British playwright and director. He has written and produced as of 2023, 89 full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their first performance. More than 40 have subsequently been produced in the West End, at the Royal National Theatre or by the Royal Shakespeare Company since his first hit Relatively Speaking opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1967.

<i>Woman in Mind</i> 32nd play by Alan Ayckbourn

Woman in Mind (December Bee) is the 32nd play by English playwright Alan Ayckbourn. It was premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough, in 1985. Despite pedestrian reviews by many critics, strong audience reaction resulted in a transfer to London's West End. The play received its London opening at the Vaudeville Theatre in 1986 where it received predominantly excellent reviews.

<i>Comic Potential</i> Play by Alan Ayckbourn

Comic Potential by Alan Ayckbourn is a romantic sci-fi comedy play. It is set in a TV studio in the foreseeable future, when low-cost androids have largely replaced actors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lyric Theatre, London</span> Theatre in the West End of London, England

The Lyric Theatre is a West End theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue in the City of Westminster. It was built for the producer Henry Leslie, who financed it from the profits of the light opera hit, Dorothy, which he transferred from its original venue to open the new theatre on 17 December 1888.

Bedroom Farce is a 1975 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. It had a London production at the National Theatre in 1977, transferring subsequently to the Prince of Wales Theatre.

Janie Dee is a British actress. She won the Olivier Award for Best Actress, Evening Standard Award and Critics' Circle Theatre Award for Best Actress in a Play, and in New York the Obie and Theatre World Award for Best Newcomer, for her performance as Jacie Triplethree in Alan Ayckbourn's Comic Potential.

<i>Private Fears in Public Places</i>

Private Fears in Public Places is a 2004 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. The bleakest play written by Ayckbourn for many years, it intimately follows a few days in the lives of six characters, in four tightly-interwoven stories through 54 scenes.

<i>The Revengers Comedies</i>

The Revengers' Comedies is a play by Alan Ayckbourn. Its title references that of The Revenger's Tragedy. The play is an epic piece running more than five hours and was designed to be presented in two parts. It was inspired by the playwright's love of films and references many notable movies, particularly the Alfred Hitchcock classic Strangers on a Train.

<i>GamePlan</i> (play)

GamePlan is a 2001 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, the first in a trilogy of plays called Damsels in Distress The darkest of the three plays, it is about a teenage girl who tries to support herself and her mother through prostitution.

<i>Damsels in Distress</i> (plays)

Damsels in Distress is a trilogy of plays written in 2001 by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. The three plays, GamePlan, FlatSpin and RolePlay, were originally performed as a set by the Stephen Joseph Theatre Company (SJT). The plays were written to be performed by the same seven actors using the same set. Although the plays loosely shared some common themes, the three stories were independent of each other and unconnected.

<i>Drowning on Dry Land</i> (play) 2004 play by Alan Ayckbourn

Drowning on Dry Land is a 2004 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, his 66th to be produced. Exploring the culture of B-list celebrities, it is a comedy about the rise and fall of Charlie Conrad, a man apparently famous for being a failure.

Michael Rudman was an American theatre director.

<i>Sugar Daddies</i> (play)

Sugar Daddies is a 2003 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. It is about a student who forms a friendship with a rich man over three times her age, who has a sinister past, and maybe a sinister present too.

<i>Haunting Julia</i>

Haunting Julia is a 1994 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. It is about Julia Lukin, a nineteen-year-old brilliant musician who committed suicide twelve years earlier, who haunts the three men closest to her, through both the supernatural and in their memories. In 2008, it was presented as the first play of Things That Go Bump.

Derrick John Goodwin was an English theatre and television director, writer and producer.

Things That Go Bump is a season of plays performed in 2008 by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn.

<i>Invisible Friends</i> 1989 childrens play by Alan Ayckbourn

Invisible Friends is a 1989 children's play by the British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. It was written as a starring vehicle for actress Emma Chambers who portrayed the central character of teenager Lucy Baines in the original production at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, England for its run in late 1989 and early 1990. Often seen as a companion play to Woman in Mind, Lucy escapes her unhappiness with her own family by reviving her imaginary childhood friend, Zara. Lucy's family, however, do not approve of this imaginative thinking. Zara helps Lucy to make her family invisible, and Lucy feels much happier and is delighted. However, Zara outstays her welcome and soon manipulates Lucy into catering and cleaning for her and her brother Chuck and father Felix before kicking Lucy out. In the end Lucy manages to defeat Zara, Chuck, and Felix and make her family visible again, and they begin to pay more attention to her.

Sir Michael Victor Codron is a British theatre producer, known for his productions of the early work of Harold Pinter, Christopher Hampton, David Hare, Simon Gray and Tom Stoppard. He has been honoured with a Laurence Olivier Award for Lifetime Achievement, and is a stakeholder and director of the Aldwych Theatre in the West End, London.

<i>Neighbourhood Watch</i> (Ayckbourn play)

Neighbourhood Watch is a 2011 play by Alan Ayckbourn. The play premiered on 13 September 2011 at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough.

Adrian McLoughlin is a British stage, television and film actor who began his career in 1983. He is best known for his 2017 role as Joseph Stalin in the Armando Iannucci film The Death of Stalin.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Background on official Ayckbourn site
  2. Ayckbourn, Alan (2003). The Crafty Art of Playmaking, Faber, ISBN   0-571-21509-2
  3. 1 2 3 Production history on official Ayckbourn site
  4. 1 2 Allen, Paul (2004) A Pocket Guide to Alan Ayckbourn Plays Faber & Faber ISBN   0-571-21492-4
  5. Alan Ayckbourn Plays. Accessed on 9/8/12 at: http://takingsteps.alanayckbourn.net/TS_Background.htm
  6. Alan Ayckbourn Plays. Accessed on 9/8/12 at: http://takingsteps.alanayckbourn.net/TS_Productions.htm
  7. Performance listing on Arts Archive