The Fifth Step: Jack Lowden and Martin Freeman are an irresistible double act
The bold-minded Belfast-born playwright David Ireland has a rare ability to attract top-flight actors for his darkly comic, often taboo-testing work, with unhinged male psyches his forte. In his breakthrough, Cyprus Avenue, Stephen Rea played a Belfast loyalist convinced his baby grand-daughter has the face of Gerry Adams. And late in 2023, Woody Harrelson starred in Ulster American as a Hibernophile Hollywood A-lister aghast to realise he has signed up to play a Protestant Unionist on stage.
With The Fifth Step, David Ireland has finally arrived in the West End attended by the kind of dream cast that has fans snapping up tickets with barely a thought for the show's content. After an Edinburgh Festival premiere last year, Slow Horses star Jack Lowden is joined for the London run by Martin Freeman, everyone's favourite Hobbit, for a dive into the step-programme of Alcoholics Anonymous, in which two men – one battling the bottle, the other his (older) sponsor – share the challenge of recovery.
I'd love to salute this as the writer's deserved hour of triumph, not least because this piece transmutes his painful experience into the stuff of accessible entertainment. The author attended AA when he was in his twenties and like Lowden's lost soul, who grabs our attention at the start by opening up to Freeman's James about his lack of luck with women, and addiction to porn, he has said he struggled with dating then. Like Luka, too, who surreally claims to have encountered Jesus in the guise of Willem Dafoe on a gym treadmill, he had a religious epiphany that saved him.
Yet despite bubbling with hard-won authenticity and again displaying Ireland's flair for nifty, surprising dialogue, the short evening (80 minutes, directed by Finn den Hertog) winds up seeming curiously flat. At Edinburgh some complained about a rushed denouement but the amended, putatively adrenal resolution here feels no less abrupt, while generating a diminished provocative charge – attention is tilted from the damage perpetuated by Luka to the demons of paranoia and jealousy suffered by James.
Interesting conversational skirmishes about the saving power of faith, and the surrogate spirituality of AA, take a back-seat to bickering about who said what. At its best, we're shown two fallible blokes striving to trust each other within a frame-work designed to help the vulnerable that still runs the risk of abusive power-play. But as a drama it finally lacks the requisite emotional punch to the guts.
The big saving grace is the makeshift double-act itself; both men winningly rising to the challenge of the ringside space's gladiatorial intimacy. Freeman's eyebrows work expressively overtime in polite quizzicality, repressed concern and growing shiftiness. Compared to this middle-aged, uptight, sexlessly married guardian-figure, Lowden captivates with his edgy physicality and a Scottish accent redolent of hard-living; he welds child-like cluelessness with a steely tenacity. To be 'glass half full' about it, their presence and gear-switches are an irresistible theatrical proposition. But the play itself remains a step-change short of a knock-out sensation.
Until July 26;
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