Review: The Fifth Step, @SohoPlace

It’s hard to imagine that David Ireland‘s The Fifth Step only premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2024. Run through with a glistening seam of laugh-out-loud comedy, the newly reworked play is additionally a sophisticated, complex piece that interweaves difficult topics into a substantial, compelling and often surprising production. We’re drawn into an almost immersive enactment of the shape-shifting, insidious nature of alcoholism, where contradictory, challenging and toxic social influences feed an ultimately incurable disease. 

At a meeting of two recovering alcoholics, James (Martin Freeman) is mentoring Luka (Jack Lowden), attempting to guide him through his illness; to perhaps meet his own achievement of 25 years sober. Luka is preparing to undertake the fifth step: the point where you examine and honestly admit to the damage you have caused both to yourself and others through the use of alcohol – a kind of confessional. 

Freeman and Lowden are an utterly outstanding team, offering poised, precision performances and deeply engaging characterisations. They each bring hugely different and intensely tangible energies that transform and trouble throughout the play. Initially, Luka is edgy and anxious: he can’t sit still, while James is calm and solid. But as they confront the issues beneath the disease, those energies shift: powerplay see-saws, sometimes subtly, and sometimes like lightning. Lowden is captivating in his agitated, constantly twitching body and his is a superb physical performance. It’s then visually unsettling as we see Luka’s delusional thoughts made concrete, imagining James as a rabbit, or with his religious conversion marked in visual splendour; in a halo of light and Jesus-like lifting weights. Freeman plays a measured foil to this, until James finally crumbles under pressure. His is an excruciatingly convincing unravelling that reveals a still seriously damaged individual beneath the veneer of sober control. The whole is electric.

Played in the round, the stage is boxed in and sparsely furnished, containing only a handful of chairs, a table and the ubiquitous tea and biscuits of recovery. Milla Clarke‘s clean design creates a focused, intimate space that heightens the stakes for the two men by keeping them in tense proximity. A raised edge hints at a boxing ring, ready for confrontation, but in some ways it becomes more of a swimming pool where they gasp for breath, Luka desperately clinging to metaphorical life rafts: church, masturbation – anything to make life worth living. It’s also where the pair risk drowning in attempting to use each other to stay afloat. Finn Den Hertog‘s impeccable directorial use of the space is flawless, sharply underscoring the unpredictable agency transfer as the men circle each other or trip around the precarious edge, seemingly fearless.

This play is about so much more than the process of getting sober. It exposes the relentless social pressures that feed the formative causes of alcoholism, with a timeless intergenerational quality to the writing that suggests a perpetuity to the problem. From toxic masculinity, poor male role models, abuse by parents and church, to anger management – the dangers emerge with clarity from a melting pot of questions. Suicidal thoughts, residual shame, emotional highs and lows are all contained within the enclosing frame and viscerally explored. But these difficult circumstances are beautifully balanced with humour and punchy one-liners that give presence to the flawed humanity of the men. 

Ultimately, the play identifies there’s perhaps no single way to battle our demons; individual experience demands bespoke belief in coping mechanisms. As James and Luke’s relationship levels out, there’s a glimmer of hope for a changed future and a positive path on which to take their next step together. 

Written by: David Ireland
Directed by: Finn den Hertog
Set and Costume Design by: Milla Clarke
Lighting Design by: Lizzie Powell
Sound Design and Composed by: Mark Melville
Movement by: Jenny Ogilvie
Fight Director: Bret Yount

The Fifth Step plays at @SohoPlace until Saturday 26 July.