Review: TWO, Park Theatre

There is a moment in TWO where you could hear a pin drop: the affable 1980s soundtrack shuts off, and a glass shatters on the floor behind the bar. A stranger has said something out of turn in the pub, and threatened to reveal whatever heartache is lurking beneath the surface of the rough-and-ready bonhomie.

That moment of silence is testament to how warm and inviting the atmosphere at the Clock & Compass pub has been so far. James Haddrell’s production (which premiered at Greenwich Theatre last year) of Jim Cartwright’s 1989 play has a keen sense of the pub as an institution. Most of the audience sit at tables on stage, the cast prowling around, flirting with punters and saying things like “bloody hell, he’s had enough tonight”.

Peter Caulfield and Kellie Shirley as the pub’s married landlord and landlady (who remain nameless) have an electrifying chemistry, that seems to speak to years of things left unsaid. When doling out pints and barbs to their punters, they have a sense of solidarity as a couple but also of melancholy, as though this pub is the only thing keeping them afloat.

Cartwright’s text is more concerned with microcosmic vignettes of working-class British life than with any broader narrative arc, so we come away with more questions than answers about the publicans. However, when the tragic penny does drop – the couple suffered a bereavement seven years before the events of the play – the pair of actors are utterly believable in their eruptions of grief and shaky steps towards reconciliation.

Caulfield and Shirley’s chemistry proves very adaptable: this is a play with an old-school approach to multi-roling, actors constantly scurrying into the wings to don a new coat and regional British accent and become one of the pub’s customers. Throughout the show – which runs to a very compact 90 minutes, including an interval – they morph into one couple in the throes of emotional abuse, another getting impulsively engaged, another reconnecting in middle age.

The challenge of a show like this, with no real plot, is to keep up momentum in the slower vignettes. Our two leads shine the brightest when acting together, and so sadly some of their individual monologues – an old man grieving, or a dissatisfied wife trying her luck with some dubiously fortunate audience members – feel out of place in a production that fundamentally centres the text’s sense of togetherness and community rather than internal feeling. This is a show called TWO, after all, not ONE.

Haddrell’s production embraces the word ‘immersive’ in all its senses, and provides a visual feast. Jana Lakatos’ set takes joy in the details of the classic British pub, the dartboard and the chalk bar tab tally and the adverts for local cleaners and hiking clubs. The lighting (also by Lakatos), meanwhile, makes the set (and the pub) much more expansive than first appears, and lends a cinematic, beacon-like quality to the couple stuck arguing behind the bar.

Neither Cartwright nor Haddrell have much politically radical to say here, but they are both obsessive in their attention to the minutiae of life at the pub, and in doing so reveal much about humans, our relationships and their failings. I’ll raise a toast to that.

TWO plays at Park Theatre until 25 April