Playwright David Ireland has made a career out of saying the unsayable, which has in the past meant gags about rape, race and other such wearyingly ‘provocative’ transgressions. With The Fifth Step he’s taken it further yet: he’s written a play about how awesome God is.
That’s a slightly glib summary. But in the programme Ireland explains how he found Jesus in 2020, and it does a lot to explain where the play’s coming from. The Fifth Step is about two men in Alcoholics Anonymous – which Ireland was a member of in the past – but the play is not really about the instition as a whole. Rather, it’s AA’s ambiguous spiritual dimension that holds the most interest to the playwright.
With a big scruffy beard and his natural Scottish accent front and centre, Jack Lowden looks and sounds a world away from his breakthrough role in Slow Horses. He plays young Glaswegian Luka, an inarticulate, twitchy mess of a man; an alcoholic who suffered a terribly abusive upbringing and is desperately lonely to boot. His very first words in the play are ‘I think I might be an incel’.
He’s addressing Martin Freeman’s James, an AA old-timer who exudes a sort of seen-it-all serenity and is clearly angling for Luka to appoint him as his sponsor – something Luka duly does.
The men get on well enough so long as James remains in the driving seat. But then something odd happens: the programme really starts working for Luka. Or it starts working in unexpected ways. James – who is staunchly atheist – tries to explain that accepting a higher power doesn’t mean anything so literal as becoming a Christian. Shortly thereafter Luka comes to believe he’s met Jesus down the gym. He finds God (literally). James is annoyed, in part because he’s been relieved from his duties as the higher power in this relationship.
It’s a strange play: if Ireland has reined in the bad taste stuff, he remains a swearword-heavy comic writer with a specialty in bruising one-liners. But he never commits to a tone: a scene in which Luka hallucinates that James has bunny ears is quite funny but the cartoonish questioning of his sanity needlessly muddies what his whole deal is. In general, Finn den Herzog’s minimalist production is tentative about grabbing the material by the scruff of the neck. The fact the play is specifically set in Glasgow gets drowned out and feels like it’s more a nod to Lowden’s accent more than anything reflected in Milla Clarke’s sterile set.
But there are fine performances from Lowden – an engaging move from chronic shyness to rapturous assertiveness – and Freeman, superbly slippery and self-absorbed as James.
However, I struggled with the actual point of James’s trajectory: as the play wears on he becomes less and less likeable and more and more angry. The character is condescending and hypocritical, but doesn’t actually seem that bad. It’s impossible to take anything like the joy in James being found out that Ireland presumably does – it feels like the playwright has a personal grudge against his own creation that he never really explains to us.
Which leaves us with Jesus: the real point of the play would seem to come down to the difference between the two men spiritually. Luka is open to God; James is not. Indeed, while the fifth step – in which Luka must list the people he’s holding resentments towards – gives the play its name, the crux of the matter would seem to be the third step, turning your life over to a higher power as you understand it. Ireland isn’t evangelising: Luka is a pretty daft character in his way, and you could even argue he’s intended as a satire on people who go OTT after finding religion. But he’s a nice guy and James is not. The inference is that James’s spiritual deadness might be the reason.
It’s uneven and didactic. Dialling down the outrage exposes the fact Ireland’s not exactly a man who writes deeply nuanced chracters. But it’s also funny, weird, well acted and provocative in a much more profound way than the nihilistic button pressing of old. And if Ireland has mellowed, it”s only so far – the intrinsically caustic nature of his writing has allowed him to write a play about the human yearning for spirituality that isn’t unbearably cringe.
