USUALLY the challenge is to prove you can walk the walk as well as you talk the talk. For Peter Gordon's new play, Walk The Walk, the Copmanthorpe playwright has to prove he can talk the talk once more.

Since 1990, he has written 11 genial comedies of an often farcical bent, plus a psychological thriller and a one-act comedy, his work being presented in 1,300 productions. Now he has come up with a comedy with an underlying darker edge as he combines humour with catastrophe and despair, while doing the thoroughly decent thing of teaming up with the British Heart Foundation for a series of fund-raising performances at clubs.

There are three public shows too by Gordon's not-for-profit Piggybank Theatre Company, two at the Priory Street Centre, the first last Saturday, the next on April 12 at 7.30pm, plus

April 6 at Stamford Bridge Village Hall at 2.30pm. Tickets will be available on the door, as well as piggyback.ticketsource.co.uk, and again all profits will go to the heart charity.

Writer-director Gordon is mounting his spring production in an in-the-round staging with no scenery at "non-traditional venues". The wonders of the Coast To Coast route from St Bees to Robin Hood's Bay must be conveyed in his words and the actions of his cast. He writes with his customary eye to physical farce, verbal clashes and pathos, creating characters that walk the tightrope of caricature, some falling the stereotype side, but one standing out as a figure of mystery: sad, troubled Malcolm.

Played with appropriate understatement by Terry Moran, Malcolm is an echo of one of Alan Bennett's specialisms: the mother's boy who has become the lost soul after her death. Malcolm is on a mission to complete his fourth Coast to Coast walk, where he is joined, whether he likes it or not (and he doesn't), by a strange assortment of fellow hikers.

Meet loud, brash American mama Barbara (exuberant Mandy Newby), who has tagged along with her daughter Kelly (a guarded Naomi Lombard), a journalist sent by the New York Times to do a travel spread, a task which she tackles with a mixture of hard-boiled cynicism and cub-reporter naivety.

The odd couple of the piece are lovers Tiffany (effervescent Emma Dubruel, the show's funniest performer) and grouchy, mocking Nick (Ben Sawyer), but they shouldn't be this odd. Sawyer has stepped in, part way through rehearsals, for the much younger James Osman, and so the chemistry is wrong. Rather than a couple's natural bickering banter, Nick now comes across as too aggressive.

Getting on everyone's nerves isDaniel Wilmot's self-appointed, self-important walk planner, Neville, a pedant who believes the Alfred Wainwright way is the right way, the only way. Peter Gordon, by contrast, is pointing out that life never follows such straight paths, as the play's "big reveal" will affirm. Those who make narrow judgements, Kelly, Nick and Neville, upset others; those who roam, Barbara and Tiffany, are more unpredictable, better balanced and good company. As for Malcolm; he's a dark horse.

The April 5 show at the KP Club in Kilnwick Percy, Pocklington, has been cancelled. For more information on further performances of Walk The Walk, visit piggybacktheatre.com