Theatre Review: Two, Royal Court Theatre

Nov 13 2007 by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

PEOPLE-WATCHING can be great entertainment when visiting a pub and it makes for remarkably good entertainment as a play, too.

Jim Cartwright’s play Two – documenting the various characters in a Northern pub – was first staged in 1989 and has had numerous revivals ever since.

It is an excellent mixture of drama and comedy, each section has its own separate story and it requires a cast of just two people, one male, one female.

To work, it needs actors of great skill and in Eithne Browne and Neil Caple this new production certainly gets them.

Each has to play a variety of characters and the changes are fast, one minute you are laughing at one person’s daftness, the next crying over another’s sad story and each time it is the same actor.

It is not so much a double act as two fine performers working off each other, sometimes alone, often in tandem.

The setting at first seems strange, a pub created out of metal keg barrels but Billy Meall’s design does work once you get used to it.

It allows the two performers full rein to allow their creations to move around the stage or often just sit still and tell us their stories.

The pair start as bickering husband and wife landlords, the husband explaining that drinking the pub’s profits is “the landlord’s temptation”. It’s a temptation the landlady succumbs to as well.

But then on come the customers and what a mixed bunch they are.

Browne in head-scarf is a sad elderly woman looking after her disabled husband and whose escape is the pub.

We have Caple as a chat-up king whose girl-friend is not impressed, then a widower, still thinking of his wife and remaining the pub’s quiet man as a result.

Browne is in fine form and funny hat as a woman who likes “big men”. Unfortunately her husband (Caple) is a bow-tie-wearing weed who cannot get served at the bar.

The publicans return for more bickering and while there are occasional funny characters, the mood gets darker as the play progresses, ending in a tale of stark tragedy.

Happily, Cartwright gives us a note of hope to end on.

Directed by Bob Eaton, with appropriate original music from Sayan Kent, Two offers two powerhouse performances which last night rightly earned a huge ovation.