'A wild merry-go-round to savour' Jack Lowden shines in The Fifth Step

Royal Lyceum Theatre

Four stars

David Ireland’s new play for the National Theatre of Scotland takes its name from Alcoholics Anonymous’ twelve step programme to recovery.

The fifth step, in which addicts open up and admit their wrongs to themselves and those around them, is regarded by some as the hardest step of all. Ireland takes this notion into assorted rooms with a couple of emotionally stunted men and lets them run with it.

Luka is an alcoholic mess, a damaged and strung out young man just starting out on the AA programme. James is his sponsor, older and presumably wiser, but with a lot of baggage of his own.

Whatever resembles small talk between these two unreconstructed men soon turns into freeform riffs on sex, sexuality and meeting Hollywood celebrities with ‘the hands of an aristocratic lady or a sad child,’ and who may or may not be Jesus. As Luka and James spar over six short scenes, the power dynamic shifts as loyalties are breached and taboos broken, so an already fractured relationship becomes something even more self-destructive than drink.

Read more about The Fifth Step

• 'I’ve fallen in love with not drinking,' says Slow Horses' Jack Lowden

• I wanted to be Bogart but I've not had a drink for 24 years, says David Ireland

Ireland’s play is the blackest of comedies, with its series of rapid-fire routines delivered in Finn den Hertog’s finely tuned production with guffaw inducing precision by Jack Lowden as Luka and Sean Gilder as James.

Much of the play’s increasing strangeness stems from Millie Clarke’s revolving set, the walls of which between the public spaces it depicts – a café, the gym, a hospital ward - are gradually torn down by Luka to the creaks of Mark Melville’s thunderous soundscape. It is as if Luka is finally prepared to expose his inner soul.

Lowden and Gilder give the play its heart as Luka James. Their delivery and timing with Ireland’s words are note perfect, and their on stage chemistry an understated delight. This should be the case too when it follows its brief Edinburgh International Festival run with a stint at Glasgow Pavilion. Ireland’s study of working class masculinity and life through the bottom of a broken glass is a wild merry-go-round to savour.