AMID the premieres and new Miller and Priestley revivals, Stepping Out stands alone as the one play in the Playhouse summer season out to do nothing more than have a good time.

Hence the amusing, uplifting opening image of a giant red shoe tapping in time to Joe Jackson's 1983 hit single Steppin' Out.

Richard Harris's tap-dancing play - and this is the straight, unalloyed version, not the musical garnish he later added - is one of those laughter-and-tears shows with a scudding cloud of social realism, a steadily intensifying fight for supremacy between clowning and frowning and a belief in rejuvenation through self-expression.

Many of John Godber's plays occupy this territory, where insecure misfits find a way out of their troubles by undertaking a transforming journey, although the Hull Truck playwright has more often focused on men experiencing this Damascene conversion.

Harris, be it in the cricket comedy Outside Edge or especially in Stepping Out, gives voice to a multitude of women. In this instance, in a Leeds church hall in the era of leg warmers in July 1983, the disparate women are members of a weekly tap class run by former professional dancer Mavis Turner (Sue Devaney) with the laconic assistance of world-weary pianist Mrs Fraser (Elizabeth Power).

Lynne (Sarah Miller) is a nurse lacking in confidence after she grew too big to be a professional dancer. Dorothy (Michelle Abrahams) is the Barbara Windsor of the group; Maxine (Kathryn Hunt), the good-time party girl; Rose (Yvonne Newman) the big-bodied, big-voiced, self-deprecating one with an aversion to the spotlight.

Then there is gawky Andy (Annette McLaughlin), the peace campaigner whose self-worth has been knocked back by domestic violence, and big, brash, gum-chewing Sylvia (Catherine Breeze), the kind to call a spade a spade and then use it for emphasis.

The comic piece de resistance is Vera (Helen Hobson, formerly Cathy to Cliff Richard's Heathcliff in Cliff's infamous musical). Vera is a Hyacinth Bucket in the making, full of airs and graces and insensitive comments, obsessed with tidiness around her and in her own well-appointed appearance, and Hobson, forever checking her shape in the mirror, is a lip-glossed riot in this ripe cherry of a role.

For comic opportunities, Harris adds a timid man, widower Geoffrey (a sweetly understated Phil Nice), who never has an opinion until he is given one.

There is no escaping from Stepping Out being a slight piece: the shock revelations of the second half - unwanted pregnancy, wife-beating, personal feuds - come and go like tourist buses, but Ian Brown's production always milks Harris's one-liners to the full-fat maximum and the flagging drama of the second half makes way for a glorious, glitzy dancing finale, courtesy of Stephen Mear's typically exuberant choreography.

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