Intense performances from Jack Lowden and Martin Freeman illuminate David Ireland’s slippery comedy about alcoholism, faith and masculinity. Lowden is Luka, a young Scot seeking a father figure in Freeman’s James, the sponsor he chooses to help him undergo the twelve-step programme to sobriety with Alcoholics Anonymous. The fifth step in this, apparently, is to admit your wrongs to God (or at least a God “of your own understanding”), to yourself and to another person: the play also introduces is to the concept of transgressive “13th-stepping”.
The two men’s relationship sours when Luka transitions from the quasi-religious strictures of AA to hardcore Christian belief after encountering Jesus – in the shape of Willem Dafoe – on the treadmill of his local gym. Alongside Marie and Rosetta at the Rose Theatre, this is the second two-hander in a week about God: there must be something in the water.
It’s seriously good to see these two actors back in a theatre in such challenging material, on an open stage that offers nowhere to hide: Milla Clarke’s set design largely consists of a table, some folding chairs and a few paper cups. Lowden, who has gone ballistic in Slow Horses since his last London stage appearance, is full of jittery, barely suppressed anxiety as the unemployed, compulsive drinker and masturbator Luka, who’s worried that his ginger hair condemns him to the life of an incel.
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Freeman, star of The Hobbit and Sherlock but a regular returner to the boards, is at first brisk and dapper as the long-sober James, who is married with an adult son (the subject of a brilliant, if digressive, rant about a shared Spotify account). James’s patronising matiness slowly grows a harder edge of menace.
Lowden plays the Dafoe anecdote with a superb poker face, while Freeman fills the many repetitions in James’s dialogue with nuance and verve. They have terrific chemistry on stage, and it’s a wonder that they manage not to corpse during a central scene that involves Freeman wearing a pair of giant, fluffy bunny ears.
Finn den Hertog’s production for the National Theatre of Scotland, first staged last year with Sean Gilder as James, deftly juggles the play’s shifts of mood and subject, as Ireland tips the scales from humour to seriousness, the quotidian to the numinous. The writer was previously best-known in London for the savagely funny Cypress Avenue, which sent up Irish sectarianism, and Ulster American, which featured two men “hypothetically” discussing rape. His wit here is more playful and less confrontational. Sure, there are still copious jokes about women’s anatomy and pedophile priests, but they feel less like an attack on the audience’s sensibilities than those earlier works.
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There is a slight feeling of insularity to The Fifth Step, perhaps because (as he tells us in a very frank programme note) it’s rooted in Ireland’s own experiences of drink-dependency, sobriety, and the discovery of faith. And as the play tells us, alcoholics are self-obsessed: maybe it’ll hit even harder for those who’ve themselves been through addiction and/or a revelation.
As it is, it’s a tight, thought-provoking, 85-minute vehicle for two actors at the top of their game. There’s also an absolutely magnificent final, visual gag that’s almost worth the price of admission alone.
The Fifth Step at @sohoplace, to 26 July, sohoplace.org.
