The year is 2030. A leather-clad dominatrix called Poopay (Laura Doddington) arrives in a suite at a grand hotel for a punishment session with its occupant.

In fact, shambling, wild-haired, geriatric businessman Reece (Ben Porter) has no appetite for cane or whip; he wants the girl to witness a confession. He owns up to complicity in (or at any rate knowledge of) the murder of his two wives. Their killer was Reece’s sinister business partner Julian (Ben Jones), also present in the suite. In possession of dangerous knowledge, Poopay is now to be another victim.

Miraculously, she is saved when, stepping through a door, she finds herself back in the same suite but 20 years earlier. There she meets Reece’s second wife Ruella (Liza Goddard) and tells her that it is her fate, that very night, to be pushed to her death from the sixth-floor balcony. Can this fate be averted? Can that of first wife Jessica (Daisy Aitkens) who is soon to be surprised (that door again!) on her honeymoon night with Reece (see right) in the suite back in 1990?

Such in outline is what happens in the early stages of Alan Ayckbourn’s Communicating Doors, a moderate success when first staged in 1994 and now out on tour in a Stephen Joseph Theatre Company production directed by the writer.

J. B. Priestley’s Time Plays (on which Ayckbourn worked as an actor in the 1950s) were an acknowledged influence on the piece. Elements of Dr Who, Back to the Future and film-noir of the fifties — including a chilling Psycho-type shower scene — can also be discerned.

For this member of the audience, at least, it was all a bit too much, and a bit too long.

At times comic — but not hootingly so — and at times frightening (but not very), the play stretches credibility considerably beyond breaking point. In this context, the astute social observation for which Ayckbourn is known is robbed of its impact. There is still much to enjoy, though, in both characterisation and performances.

Until Saturday. Tickets: www.oxfordplayhouse.com or 01865 305305.