Two - The Studio Theatre at The Customs House, South Shields

Two by Jim Cartwright
Director: Bill Cronshaw
Reviewer: Ian Cain

Set in a Northern pub, Two is – as the title suggests – a two-handed play by Jim Cartwright. Jilly Breeze and Adrian Ross-Jones play a variety of characters, encompassing the publicans and a selection of their regular customers.

It is staged in The Studio Theatre at The Customs House, which is the ideal space to provide the intimacy that the piece requires.

The characters of the landlord and landlady of the pub provide a constant thread that runs through the play, and they are a couple at war with each other. They may look happy to their punters but after closing time their conflict provides a dramatic spine for the show. Indeed, it is impossible not to draw comparison with the pub-running, pint-pulling legends that were Den and Angie Watts from The Queen Vic in EastEnders.

Other characters include a violent, bullying husband and his downtrodden wife, a pair of oddball cyclists from the Midlands, an old man and an old woman.

The script demands a lot from Breeze and Ross-Jones and, for the most part, they deliver the goods. It must be difficult to portray such an array of differing parts in such a short space of time and this deprives the actors the opportunity to immerse themselves into any particular character. It also robs the audience of the opportunity to form an emotional relationship with most of them, too.

However, this is not the case with the publicans themselves who, strangely, are not given any individual character names. The drama really unfolds during an after-hours confrontation which reveals the catalystic incident that sent their marriage careering off the tracks but, ultimately, culminates in a reconciliation of sorts.

The set is sparsely simple but adequately effective – just a bar, a couple of tables and a few chairs. However, the actors use the set well and manage with only a limited selection of props.

Overall, Two is an entertaining production which owes more of its success to the performances from Breeze and Ross-Jones than it does to Cartwright’s writing.