It is set on a summer morning in Edinburgh during the festival but David Ireland’s two-hander, first staged as a reading at the fringe in 2012, has an odd sort of Christmas spirit heightened by the timing of its London premiere.
To explain requires some spoilers about its bizarre twists but the setting could not be more straightforward. In a Travelodge hotel room, a couple wake up after a one night stand. She’s in the shower; he’s devouring a bucket of KFC for breakfast. When she emerges, Glaswegian Mary (Karen Pirie star Lauren Lyle) licks her lips and takes pleasure from recounting their mind-blowing sex while Hoosier Mike (Skins’ Alexander Arnold) reserves his orgasmic delight for the drumsticks. Wasn’t last night amazing, she asks. “It was something else,” he replies – and half an hour later we find out what he means.
Far from a casual encounter, this one-nighter is the result of separate missions. Mary has spent months sleeping with different men in order to get pregnant. Mike, whose apparent naivety grows increasingly suspect, reveals himself to have been dispatched for just that job. And it is very much a duty – he has planned the conception like a business trip.
Beneath its strange comedy of miscomprehension and some fizzy repartee (mostly from Mary), Ireland considers, albeit far more fleetingly, similar issues of secular and religious faith, affirmation, self-belief and sheer goodwill to his more recent two-hander, The Fifth Step. The lightness of Lyle and Arnold’s rapport means that seriousness doesn’t always surface but they remain a compelling double act as they shift the sands. Each character has moments of touching tenderness, specifically around the gift of Mary’s pregnancy, amid gags riffing on each other’s very different worlds. Together they capture the awkward morning-after mix of intimacy and anonymity, heightened by Ceci Calf’s set, which has the right muted colours and stuffy air (curtains are opened to reveal the charming view of a brick wall).
The humour is never as outlandish as Ireland’s black comedies Ulster American or Cyprus Avenue and Max Elton’s production could perhaps benefit from borrowing more from the discombobulated, wired feeling of the fringe. In what could almost be a TV pilot, the script is delivered with the flourish of a tall tale but makes for an invigoratingly earnest consideration of the divine and the very human. Its origins lie in a series of “dream plays” envisioned by Edinburgh’s Traverse to let playwrights realise ideas that would be otherwise unimaginable. At 45 minutes, the result is funny and chewy but leaves you yearning for a bit more.
At Soho theatre, London, until 24 January
