THEATER REVIEW / ‘TAKING STEPS’ : Bare Bones : The British play provides Santa Barbara audiences with many opportunities to get lost.

Arch wit, bedroom scandals, and English accents. Say no more--it has to be an Alan Ayckbourn play. The British playwright is, after all, the ubiquitously staged, premier farceur of our time.

His enormous popularity has earned Ayckbourn the unfortunate epithet of “the British Neil Simon,� though the comparison is about as apt as dubbing Sherlock Holmes the British Dick Tracy. Multiple levels of human complexity and social criticism in Ayckbourn’s work hone even his broadest comedies to razor-edged satire.

Regrettably, many of Ayckbourn’s sharper satirical skills are seriously blunted in a well-intentioned but overreaching staging of “Taking Steps� by Kay Digby for Santa Barbara’s Theatre Pacifica.

It’s a play with many opportunities to get lost. Ayckbourn’s convoluted plot involves Tristram (Ron Scala), a timid solicitor who gets more than he bargained for when he drops in to finalize the sale of a country estate. The fawning owner (Michael Lee Davis) is selling the estate to his nouveau riche tenants. In the midst of negotiations, the tenant, an obnoxiously gregarious self-made bucket tycoon (Kat Shannon), discovers a farewell note his departing wife has left him. In his resulting distress, he begs the solicitor to remain overnight in the creaking three-story house--a one-time bordello reportedly haunted by the ghost of a murdered prostitute.

The inebriated host puts Tristram in the master bedroom, setting the stage for an unfortunate case of mistaken identity when the wife (Karen Jeanette Santos) returns after a change of heart. She thinks she’s cuddling up with her husband, Tristram thinks he’s met the ghost, and, well--you get the idea.

The fallout from this unfortunate confusion triggers complications in a thoroughly British vein. Where else could we go from drunken brawling to strained small talk in the same scene?

It’s exactly the exaggerated hypocrisy of British society, with its highly stratified class system, that provokes much of Ayckbourn’s wicked satire, but the subtleties of snobbery have eluded the cast here. We only get occasional hints, such as when the wife’s brother (Rick Hansen) tells his lower-class girlfriend (Margie Middleton), “Your life is here with real people--people like me.� If this pervasive class consciousness was an overall goal in the staging, it hasn’t made it into the implementation.

A related comic theme in Ayckbourn is that the higher the perch on the social ladder, the more repressed the climber. Only Scala’s likable Tristram incorporates this repression into his performance, and it gives real teeth to his wry comment about the obligations of social convention (“The sooner people are allowed not to do things, the better�).

A healthy dose of neurotic repression could heighten the effectiveness throughout, especially the living room scene where the principals make overly polite chitchat following the revelation of the wife’s inadvertent affair.

Ayckbourn’s typical fondness for clever structural gamesmanship manifests itself in overlapping the three floors of the house on the same stage space, with characters crossing levels via imaginary staircases (though the exact number of steps to be taken seems ill-defined at times). Part of the fun would be to keep all the characters in view on the different floors, but director Digby and Craig A. Hane’s scenic design allow them periodic exits from the fray.

In a way, there’s an unintentional appropriateness in the minimal scaffolding used to define the walls and doorways--what we get here is a rough skeleton of Ayckbourn’s play without the finishing touches.

* WHERE AND WHEN

“Taking Steps� will be performed Thursdays and Fridays through June 26 at 8 p.m. at La Casa de la Raza, 601 E. Montecito St., in Santa Barbara. Tickets are $10. For reservations or further information call 564-0815.