ROLAND Crabbe is a very successful manufacturer of buckets. He lives in a leased three-storey house with his wife Elizabeth who wants to leave him after three months of marriage to pursue her career as fifth-rate dancer.

Her brother Mark is about to renew his relationship with the fiancee who abandoned him on what was to have been their wedding day. Leslie Bainbridge is the Crabbes' landlord and desperately needs to sell the house to them. Tristram Watson is the idiotic young lawyer sent by his firm to represent Mr Crabbe's interest in the sale.

In the setting of Alan Ayckbourn's play, all three storeys of the house exist on the same level. Going up and down the stairs is simulated by the actors whose paths keep seeming to criss-cross yet who seldom meet because they move on different floors.

It is a rich vein of farce to mime, and it has the slightly more serious metaphor of people who, even in the same space, and even having important matters of money or emotion to transact, never quite manage to meet except by the blindest of accidents.

Unfortunately, in Brian de Salvo's new production for Gaiety Entertainments, there is little meeting of theatrical minds, never mind bodies. It is as if there had been not nearly enough rehearsal time for the characters to be realised and rounded or the complex moves and effects to be perfected.

It is played with sledge-hammer effect on a script which is much more subtle than was evident last night, focused as it was more on the one-line jokes than on the characterisations and social foibles which provide the substance of the play.

Even the setting seems to have been hastily and inexpensively cobbled together and, for all the energy that Nicholas Grennell (the lawyer), Mark O'Regan (the brother), Donna Dent (the dancer), Richard Heffer (the bucket-maker), Mal Whyte (the landlord) and Isobel Mahon (the fiancee) put into their over-the-top performances, their effort is misdirected.

Mr Ayckbourn's excellent plays, for all the seeming madness of their actions, need much more depth of characterisation and much more persuasive a sense of "reality" than was evident last night. A pity, because Mr de Salvo got it right more than 10 years ago when he directed it for the Gate.