The Fifth Step evaluation – Jack Lowden and Martin Freeman go face to face | Theatre

Jack Lowden wasn’t away from the stage for so long as his Gradual Horses co-star Gary Oldman nevertheless it’s nonetheless a thrill to search out him returning to theatre. Seen on the Edinburgh worldwide pageant final summer season, The Fifth Step – his first play since 2018 – provides him a personality each unstable and weak in a two-hander bristling with playwright David Eire’s signature type of knotty provocation and ribald comedy.

Lowden resumes the position of Luka, now taking part in reverse Martin Freeman as James (a component originated in Scotland by Sean Gilder). Luka is new to Alcoholics Nameless and asks the older James to be his sponsor; the drama unfolds on the verge of the confessional stage in AA’s 12-step programme, with Luka anticipated to acknowledge the hurt his habit has executed to himself and others.

The play is perceptive about what it means to place your belief not simply in one other particular person but additionally in a programme or organised faith – and tips on how to reconcile what you acquire from the trade with any flaws or failings of that physique. Eire pulls off a tone that’s sceptical but earnest, echoing the sincerity and hangdog humour of the opening track, I’m Simply an Outdated Chunk of Coal (However I’m Gonna Be a Diamond Sometime), by Johnny Money, who knew a factor or two about habit.

That track is warped within the first of a number of scene transitions, coolly lit by Lizzie Powell, that add off-kilter power to an in-the-round, interval-free manufacturing, stretched as tight as a drum by director Finn den Hertog. The humour ricochets because it did in den Hertog’s Sq. Go, which tussled with youthful masculinity, and there’s a brilliantly dealt with apparition of Willem Dafoe as Jesus in a gymnasium (virtually Christ on a motorbike) that recollects the imaginative and prescient of Gerry Adams in toddler type in Eire’s unforgettable Cyprus Avenue.

Designer Milla Clarke clothes Luka in hoodie and trainers, James in good shirt and suede footwear; the youthful man is all stressed legs and twitching fingers, his sponsor composed and watchful. As ever, Freeman is a grasp of the perplexed response, particularly in James’s multi-levelled incredulity on the suggestion that, as a married man, he has “pussy on faucet”. When Luka is suggested to abstain from his gargantuan urge for food for masturbation, Lowden matches Freeman in comedian disbelief – his eyes widen in horror on the proposal.

The timing is impeccable all through however because the tables are turned, and James’s behaviour is scrutinised, each give unsettling performances in a drama that particularly interrogates the position of a sponsor but applies to a number of positions of authority and affect, together with parenthood and priesthood. What seems at first to be a predictable plot twist, foreshadowed by a selection little bit of dialogue from Raging Bull, swerves into one thing extra psychologically attention-grabbing. The nameless meeting-room set provides no place to cover because the pair, collectively on stage all through, go toe to toe. If the violence that finally erupts is undercharged, the notes of absurdity are completely measured and it ends not with a bang however whimsy.

What energy do you give one other while you put your religion in them? What requirements do you maintain them to while you search recommendation? When does care flip into management? Because the questions proliferate and the pair argue over setting boundaries, Eire regularly blurs them in a play that repeatedly elicits winces. “These which are crying will later be laughing,” paraphrases James from the Bible. The reverse is maybe true for this troubling tackle feeling misplaced and the thorny query of redemption.