Alan Ayckbourn, author of Taking Steps, has long been one of England's successful exports. Born in 1939, he is part of a generation of British theatre comic writers that includes Joe Orton (1933-67) and Tom Stoppard (1937- ), whose Arcadia was performed on NEIU's Stage Center Theatre this past April. While all three playwrights are funny, Ayckbourn is alone in his reliance on farce. Like another British contemporary, John Cleese (1939- ), Ayckbourn is a native of Farce whereas the rabidly cynical Orton and the witty-worded Stoppard merely stray through that strange land on occasion.
           
Though Ayckbourn has been knighted for his theatrical career, he differs from his two contemporaries outside theatrical circles. The works of Orton and Stoppard are taught in our universities—not merely theatre classes, but in general literature classes as well as in philosophy classes, but it is a rare syllabus that includes Ayckbourn. In that regard, he is more like his American contemporary, Neil Simon.  Ayckbourn's plays and Simon's comedies generally receive rave reviews that inevitably include the word 'funny' modified by 'uproariously' or 'wildly.'  Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is misleading. Both Simon and Ayckbourn are masters of staging and not merely stringers of great 'gags' in zany situations.
           
True, farce does expect its audience to accept as actual the most unlikely, if not downright impossible, occurrences. If a Shakespearean tragedy requires, as Coleridge said, the "willing suspension of disbelief," Ayckbourn's farces, like teevee's I Love Lucy and the best of the Marx Brothers' movies, require the willing banishment of utter incredulity. All have been and may easily be dismissed as silly.

But Ayckbourn isn't merely silly. He uses the tried and proven strategies of most successful farces. All the stock elements are here. We have rumors of ghosts and the supernaturally inexplicable. We have verbal absurdities resulting from words being misused or misunderstood. We encounter the cuckolded husband and the inept lover. Mistaken identity also plays its part. We see greed, lust and drunkenness.  We have the self-absorbed mingling with the self-absolved.  We watch chase scenes, eavesdropping, misdirected epistles.  In short, farce, and Ayckbourn's especially, gives us humanity writ small, humanity writ silly, humanity writ almost vaudevillian. And somehow, by play's end, this flawed humanity more or less finds a comfy solution to its absurd problems.

Sounds almost like an American sit-com. But Ayckbourn brings to his farces a little extra. Does anyone ever feel sympathy for Margaret Dumont when Groucho's wisecracks belittle her? Does anyone ever think Ricky Ricardo’s anger will last longer than the next commercial? But Ayckbourn's characters have a poignancy despite the absurdity of their dilemmas. This is often true in Simon's best work.

But there is even more to Ayckbourn's work. Simon's work often feels repetitious. Plaza Suite in staging and premise is not far from California Suite, though the former takes place in Manhattan and the latter three thousand miles further west.  In each, three separate couples spend time in the same hotel room. Ayckbourn seems constant in his commitment to avoid that kind of theatrical redundancy.  He can be Simonesque, to be sure, as with Absurd Person Singular, which involves Christmas party catastrophes in three separate kitchens, one in each of three successive years, hosted by a different couple, with the other two couples as the guests. That's not far from Simon's world. The Norman Conquests is a little further away. It is really a trilogy of plays, each taking place in the same house on the same weekend, but each play is in a different area of the house. Would Simon ever require that one female character be played simultaneously (as separate personality aspects) by three actresses, while the ten men in that woman's life be played by one actor? Ayckbourn's Me, Myself, and I does just that, and it's a farce as well as a musical!

In other words, Ayckbourn is always tinkering with the machine. He is never out of the country of Farce, but he is always changing the scenery or the infrastructure. In Communicating Doors, the internal doors between two hotel suites become portals into different decades: Time travel becomes farcical! In Taking Steps, farce has become a sort of Cubist painting.

Cubism, as an art movement, was an attempt to free the two-dimensional space of a canvas from perspective. Picasso and Braque made pictures suddenly that looked funny and weird and out of sorts, and that was because, in ignoring perspective, they showed objects from angles and views impossible to be seen simultaneously. In Taking Steps, which was written early in Aychbourn’s career (1978), the playwright collapses dimension. A house with three storeys is flattened into a single plane. The staircases are part of the set, but they are flat as well. Thus, Ayckbourn allows us to see three levels at once.

Some playwrights and set designers had tried to solve the ‘tenement’ problem in plays before, by building three levels on a stage. But comedy is about timing. Farce depends on uninterrupted pace. What happens on the second floor immediately affects persons on the first. The tri-level stage precludes that kind of timing—so Ayckbourn threw away the ‘tenement’ set and embraced a theatrical Cubism, if you will.

Which is why Taking Steps feels weird initially. We need to get used to the unconventional representation of space just as it has taken some time for each generation of art viewers to accept the power of Picasso and Braque’s Cubist experiments.