The Fifth Step
Run Time:
90 minutes, no interval
Closing: July 26, 202590 minutes, no interval
The Fifth Step - 2025 West End History , Info & More
@sohoplace
4 Soho Place, Charing Cross Road, W1D 3BG London
After many years in the 12-step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous, James agrees to become the sponsor of newcomer Luka.
On the journey to sobriety, the pair bond over black coffee, trade stories, and build a fragile friendship out of their shared experiences.
On the cusp of Step 5, their conversations must turn to confessionals, with progress hinging on Luka revealing secrets that could lead back to alcohol. But it’s clear that James also has dangerous truths in his past, truths that threaten the trust on which both their recoveries depend.
Following an acclaimed sold-out Edinburgh season, Olivier Award-winner Jack Lowden (Slow Horses, Dunkirk) reprises his role as Luka joined in the West End by Emmy, BAFTA and SAG Award winner Martin Freeman (The Responder, Sherlock) as James.
Directed intimately in-the-round by Finn den Hertog, The Fifth Step is a provocative, entertaining and subversively funny new play from David Ireland.
The Fifth Step - 2025 - West End Cast
FEATURED REVIEWS FOR The Fifth Step
Jack Lowden explodes with energy opposite Martin Freeman’s sad dad
6 / 10
Lowden explodes with half-suppressed energy as Luka, an unemployed, sex-obsessed alcoholic desperate to pummel his wayward life into shape. Help comes in the form of James, a fellow AA member who’s been sober for decades, but this middle-aged sad dad isn’t always the best advocate for his booze-free lifestyle. The everyguy authenticity that has made Freeman a telly regular is lost a little here, in a slightly underwhelming stage performance. Instead, this play’s appeal comes from the hilarious clashes between Luka’s blunt literal-mindedness and James’s patronising obfuscation. “Cultivate a relationship with yourself,” advises the older man. “I thought you said I wasn’t meant to do that any more!” says Luka, battling to beat his 20-a-day masturbation habit.
Martin Freeman and Jack Lowden spar in crisply funny Alcoholics Anonymous play
8 / 10
The play dances to and fro, interweaving serious questions with crisply funny dialogue and combining the absurd with the profound. Luka’s awakening, for instance, arrives on a treadmill at the gym when he is apparently joined by Jesus in the guise of actor Willem Dafoe. In Finn den Hertog’s tightly paced production, the action plays out like a boxing match, which works wonderfully in Soho Place’s in-the-round space. Milla Clarke’s spare design — a table and a few chairs — has dispensed with the set the show had in Edinburgh, leaving the two actors exposed, in tune with their characters’ feelings.
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Review Roundup: David Ireland's THE FIFTH STEP @sohoplace
by Aliya Al-Hassan - May 20, 2025
by Aliya Al-Hassan - May 20, 2025
After many years in the 12-step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous, James agrees to become the sponsor of newcomer Luka. On the cusp of Step 5, their conversations must turn to confessionals, with progress hinging on Luka revealing secrets that could lead back to alcohol. But it’s clear that James also has dangerous truths in his past, truths that threaten the trust on which both their recoveries depend.
Review: THE FIFTH STEP, starring Martin Freeman and Jack Lowden
by Cindy Marcolina - May 19, 2025
by Cindy Marcolina - May 19, 2025
Plays like The Fifth Step don't come around often. Those whose layered philosophical exoskeleton props up their own dramatic contradictions in quietly superb theatre. At its core, though less pure black comedy and more complex introspective drama coated in dark irony than what you’d expect from David Ireland, it has that delicious push-and-pull that only Ireland can write. It’s a potluck of themes. Alcoholism, recovery, resentment, masculinity, spirituality, family, class, what-have-you populate a play that’s as tense as it is caustic.
Photos: Jack Lowden and Martin Freeman in THE FIFTH STEP
by Chloe Rabinowitz - May 14, 2025
by Chloe Rabinowitz - May 14, 2025
You can now get a first look at photos of the West End transfer of David Ireland’s acclaimed new play The Fifth Step, starring Jack Lowden and Martin Freeman. See photos here!
The Fifth Step History
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