Theatre Review: Two

Theatre Review: Two

06/10/25-07/10/25

Directed by India Scarlet Kolb

Written by Jim Cartwright

Reviewed by Nimaya Lemal

My expectations for a student production opening three weeks into the semester were modest as I sat down in the green light for Two in the Barron on Monday night. Then came Kolb’s sleek, bottle-crashing, cosy, table-turning show. 

First performed in 1989 in Bolton and staged in St Andrews back in 2014, this October, India Scarlet Kolb brings Jim Cartwright’s boisterous, tragicomedy back to the Byre. The black box, alight with a Heineken green tint, uses a bare bones set for the everyman’s English boozer: there are two tables, chairs, and a bar. The furniture features cardboard elements, a simple but effective choice that introduces a childlike touch in line with the play’s axial plot point. Shrine-like, green glass bottles set the bar aglow, their background chinking and rattling accompanying the actors’ footsteps and voices. Our Landlady and Landlord (Ruby Thake and Michael Griffith) expertly sweep the audience into the warm embrace of a bustling pub. There is no doubt we are in good hands.

The story takes place over one night. Traditionally performed by two actors role-switching at lightning speed, Kolb’s cast of twelve fills out the pub and makes it their own. The play’s subject is the (heterosexual) couple, and they come in all conditions of longing. We have ‘pig weary couples’, unfaithful couples, and, in a stunning scene (the play’s darkest), an abusive couple, performed to chilling effect by Ezequiel Vigo and Martha Thomson.

Some characters — like the cringe-inducing, smooth-dancing paramour Moth (Sacha Threipland) — are timeless and kept the crowd laughing. Elsewhere, the play at times shows its age. References to ‘mild’ and ‘bitters’ set the pub back a few decades, and so do Cartwright’s explorations of gender and romantic love. Cartwright only explores heterosexual dynamics and leaves both male and female characters very little room to play beyond somewhat outdated gender stereotypes. Male characters struggle with threats of emasculation and emotions, while half a dozen female characters try to handle it. A notable exception is the ‘Old Man’, beautifully explored by Buster Ratcliffe Van der Geest.

The one immersion-breaking choice, for me, was the affected accents. Affecting regional accents might have made more sense had the actors all adopted the same accent to locate the pub in a Northern English town (as Cartwright originally intended) or used the accents for narrative clarity, for instance, to distinguish between multiple roles. As it was, there was no clear coherence across the range of accents — which ranged from the American south to East London — aside from, perhaps, that they could all be stereotyped as working-class accents. If this was an attempt to introduce an element of class commentary, it did not feel fully developed or critically thought through. (One is tempted to ask the cast, is one’s own accent incompatible with being working class?) The choice to distort many of the actors’ voices might have been an early-career experiment by the Mermaids. For me, it was a miss.

Otherwise, I have to hand it to the director and cast of Two. The rapport between Thake and Griffith is exceptional. I knew I could watch them all day, even before Griffith pulled off a professional handling of a set collapse at the climax of the play. From start to curtain the pace is expert. The rich, crisp motion of Kolb’s blocking could pass for choreography; the actors fully and beautifully inhabit the space using levels and the aisle space as easily as breathing. The story’s thematic toying with need and emptiness has the audience somber one moment and giggling the next. It was a strange delight to sit together in Willa Meloth’s bold lighting design, which kept the story squarely in ‘flick and shadow land’.

I quickly fell for these actors, even though I knew none of them. Halfway through the show, I realised I already felt that warm feeling of seeing old, familiar faces whenever they appeared back on stage. That feeling is something one usually finds in a small-town pub, or, in the right company, the theatre.