There are few certainties in David Ireland’s latest drama. It is slippery yet sincere, funny but serious, with an ending that might leave you none the wiser. A young out-of-work alcoholic is unsure about joining the 12-step programme until a former addict sweeps in as his sponsor to save him, or so it seems. Luka (Jack Lowden) meets the older James (Sean Gilder) through Alcoholics Anonymous. The play’s focus (or maybe it is James’s) is the fifth step towards recovery, which requires writing down all the things that bring guilt and shame – to share with a trusted friend.
James seems fatherly at first, but becomes angrily judgmental; Luka is uncertain of himself but then confrontational and fatherly. Certainties continue to be unpinned, just like Milla Clarke’s revolving set, which partly collapses to show its innards until nothing seems straightforwardly real.
Under the direction of Finn den Hertog, The Fifth Step sometimes feels oddly paced, with movement crudely contrived and a visual hallucination of a giant rabbit that seems borrowed from Donnie Darko and which is too abruptly abandoned. But this is a more intimate two-hander than Ireland’s usual fare, less blackly comic and perhaps more complex.
Lowden, as jittery Luka, and Gilder as the avuncular James, have an easy connection on stage, both giving intense performances without becoming overwrought. Lowden’s delivery sits between uneasy comedy and vulnerability, while Gilder’s character becomes more red-faced and paranoid, so you begin to suspect it is the sponsor who has fallen off the wagon and needs help.
More than a study of addiction or recovery, the play is a portrait of marooned young masculinity apparently in the throes of sexual crisis, although questions around homosexuality seem rather flat-footed, and Luka’s sexual self-discovery more a plot twist than rooted in psychology.
“I think I might be an incel,” says Luka, and the line gets laughs but you can see that his mix of suicidal loneliness (“I don’t belong in this world”), porn-fuelled sexual frustration and a blind focus born of an addictive personality perhaps might lead him down that path.
Instead, the zeal – or addiction – finds a home in religion after Luka has a spiritual awakening on a gym treadmill. Faith, so often featuring in Ireland’s work, is again prominent here but not sectarian, and becoming part of the two men’s bigger ideological and power battles. Christianity is both a life-jacket and a false ideology. The Catholic church butts heads with Taoism and Presbyterianism. The “higher power” of the 12-step programme is queried, too. This debate hangs over the play, unresolved, so it is unclear whether Luka’s recovery is predicated on the acceptance of faith or its rejection.
There is an almost Pinteresque dynamic between the characters, the power switching so that the mentor seems to become the tyrannical father at times, and the mentee the voice of reckoning at others. If Ireland’s 2016 play Cyprus Avenue shocked with its literal murder of a granddaughter, this play presents a more Freudian, father-son clash. Does the son need to kill his father, metaphorically, to find his own freedom? “You become the father to yourself that you needed,” says James, early on, about the way in which the 12 steps will help him, and those words are instructive to the end.
Ireland dispenses with the humour of the start for something altogether more serious although the drama continues to play an elusive game around meaning. This is a puzzle of a play, but in a good way.
• At the Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 25 August. Then at the Pavilion theatre, Glasgow, 28-31 August.
