Intense performances from Jack Lowden and Martin Freeman illuminate David Ireland’s slippery comedy about alcoholism, faith and masculinity. Lowden is Luka, a young Scot seeking a father figure in Freeman’s James, the sponsor he chooses to help him undergo the twelve-step programme to sobriety with Alcoholics Anonymous. The fifth step in this, apparently, is to admit your wrongs to God (or at least a God “of your own understanding”), to yourself and to another person: the play also introduces is to the concept of transgressive “13th-stepping”.
The two men’s relationship sours when Luka transitions from the quasi-religious strictures of AA to hardcore Christian belief after encountering Jesus – in the shape of Willem Dafoe – on the treadmill of his local gym. Alongside Marie and Rosetta at the Rose Theatre, this is the second two-hander in a week about God: there must be something in the water.
