The Gate's mini-season of Life Journeys ends with this extraordinary hour-long play by the Italian Edoardo Erba. Pitched halfway between reality and dream, it concerns two men, Mario and Steve, who swap thoughts on life, love, death and sex while training for the New York marathon. It certainly gives new meaning to the old critical catchphrase, "This one will run and run."
What we see, in Mick Gordon's exhilarating production and Dick Bird's ingenious design, is two actors on parallel treadmills. But clues are there from the start that this is no ordinary training session: Mario is initially stretched out barefoot on the roadside and, even when suitably shod, ambles while Steve purposefully jogs. Mario also constantly questions the point of running, of pushing oneself to the limit, while Steve rejoices in suffering, survival and achieving predetermined goals.
Erba lists Beckett, Pinter and Borges among his influences, and what he has written here is a kind of joggers' Godot. Like his masters, he has created something that works on both realistic and symbolic levels. The two guys plausibly curse, bicker, josh each other about women. At the same time, they are emblems of polarised attitudes to life: Mario is a reluctant competitor who craves freedom of choice while Steve is an anal-retentive for whom fitness is a source of sexual pride and running "a question of overcoming your fear". The New York marathon takes on the quality of an elusive utopia or, if you like, a geographical Godot at which they will never arrive.
I had to go back to the text to fully grasp what happened in the final moments. But otherwise Colin Teevan's English version brilliantly transcends translation to sound like an original play. And no praise is too high for the actors.
JD Kelleher, taking over at short notice as Steve, not only runs for the entire hour but exactly captures the teeth-gritting intensity of this kind of macho masochist. Ciaran McMenamin also endows Mario with the right sceptical, questioning charm while in his fantasies emerging as a natural front-runner. But whether life's race really goes to the swift is a question Erba's play leaves tantalisingly open.
Till December 11. Box office: 0171-229 0706.
