THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By David Ireland
@sohoplace, 4 Soho Place, London W1D 3BG, London until 26 July 2025
This two-hander, which premiered at Edinburgh Festival last summer, presents two actors at the top of their game in a perfectly crafted play that explores issues of addiction, masculinity and faith.
Jack Lowden is currently riding the crest of a wave with the success of Apple’s Slow Horses, and his work as a film producer, while multi-award winner Martin Freeman just shines in whatever genre he tackles. The piece bristles with David Ireland’s signature blend of dry-as-dust wit, comic horror and piercing social observation.
Freeman plays James, a happily married middle-aged man who has spent years in Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12 Step program. He agrees to become the ‘sponsor’ of a newcomer Luka (Lowden), and the play enacts their sessions where they bond over black coffee, trade stories and slowly build a fragile friendship out of their shared experiences. On the cusp of the Fifth Step however their conversations turn into confessionals, hinging on Luka revealing secrets that have led him to fall off the wagon... or has he?
The play intelligently explores: What power do you give another when you put your faith in them? What standards do you hold them to when you seek advice? When does care turn into control? What does it mean to put your trust in any belief system, be it AA or the Catholic Church? And what can you gain from those exchanges?
Director Finn den Hertog, who first staged this for National Theatre of Scotland, makes great use of the in-the-round setting here by putting the two men, like boxers, in a lowered rectangular space where simple props are pulled out and neatly put away. In essence it’s a series of therapy sessions, but the piece never sags for an instant and Mark Melville’s sound design and cleverly chosen music perfectly punctuate the scene transitions.
Lowden is fantastic in how he calibrates the evolution of Luka from suicidal alcoholic despair to a new found sense of purpose, albeit on shaky ground. His restless thighs and twitching fingers eventually subside, but overall, he’s still a mix of jittery unhappiness and wounded self-righteousness. Ireland has a perfect ear for young working-class men and how their blunt inarticulacy is yet so revealing. It’s Mamet in Glasgow.
Early on Luka says he fears he might be an incel because he can’t talk to a woman without being drunk and the play is great on the currently sad state of the ‘battle of the sexes’. The key issue of course is that even when he’s sober his attitude to women is transactional, to put it very mildly.
James as the sponsor has to slowly help him unpack all this like a therapist would and this is perhaps an indictment of the AA model. To James’s disdain, Luka, takes comfort in getting involved with a Christian church where he also manages to find a lover! Rather hilariously his Road to Damascus moment happens at the gym, in the form of an apparition by Willem Dafoe (he’s a film fan), and the play explores the role that organized religion can play in healing or in reestablishing a stable life.
Freeman’s acting is sublime throughout, and nobody can do multi-level incredulity better than him. His reaction to Luka’s revelation of his 20 times a day porn habit is an object lesson in comic disbelief. But he also captures the darker side of the seemingly perfect James, who becomes quite aggressive when finally challenged.
The play hinges on a point in the relationship between the two men when the tables are turned and where Luka feels he cannot take the fifth step, the one where you have to do a moral inventory of everything bad you’ve done in your life, with someone whom he now cannot trust.
It all makes for an unflinchingly honest, painfully funny, perfectly distilled, 90 minutes of drama.
