Taking Steps: The Mill at Sonning

The over-the-top antics of boozy, bucket-making millionaire Roland sometimes dominate the stage to the exclusion of all else in productions of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1979 comedy Taking Steps.

 Not so in the well-judged revival, directed by Ian Masters and delighting audiences at Sonning. Though the play is considered a farce — Ayckbourn dedicated the play to the master of the genre, Ben Travers — this production offers far more in the way of genuine emotion than the description might suggest.

 David McAlister’s portrayal of the whisky-slugging Roland presents us with a recognisable human being rather than a comic stereotype. We feel real sorrow for this doting husband when his wife Elizabeth (Natalie Ogle) walks out on him — just some of those ‘steps’ the title alludes to — to resume her career as an energetic hoofer.

 It is this event that sets the plot in motion, beginning as Elizabeth reveals her imminent defection to her brother Mark (Nick Waring) as she packs her bags in the main bedroom of a rambling Victorian mansion, called The Pines – a former brothel, allegedly haunted by a spectral tart, Scarlet Lucy.

 Mark is a personnel officer with an ambition to own an angling shop. “Fishing is Transcendental Meditation with an end product,” he says. Aids to relaxation like TM, in fact, are unnecessary when he is around, with dull conversation that puts everyone to sleep — a running joke in the play.

 And speaking of running, it is no wonder that his neurotic fiancée Kitty (Catherine Skinner) has run away. She later returns to add to the confusions of the night.

 By then, we are up to speed about what is happening with The Pines. Currently its tenant, Roland intends to buy the place from its doltish, near-bankrupt builder owner Leslie (Harry Gostelow). “Very successful men should live in very big houses,” he tells the tyro solicitor Tristram — a fine comic turn from Ross Hatt — who arrives to deal with the legal aspects of the purchase.

 Plied with huge measures of his client’s whisky, tongue-tied Tristram decides to stay the night, not realising he will soon be sharing his bed with Scarlet Lucy. If that’s who she is . . .

The action shifts between the bedroom, the attic above (where poor Kitty is trapped in a cupboard for the night) and the sumptuous drawing room below.

 A conceit of the staging (cleverly designed by Michael Holt) is that all three floors occupy the same level stage. As scenes shift, the characters ‘climb’ the imaginary staircases between the rooms — another instance of ‘taking steps’.

The Mill at Sonning Until Saturday, March 23 0118 969 8000