Most Favorite Review – David Ireland’s brief encounter asks big questions | stage

IThe film is set on a summer morning in Edinburgh during a festival, but David Ireland’s play Two Hands, which was first performed as a sideline reading in 2012, has a strange kind of Christmas spirit heightened by the timing of its London premiere.

The explanation requires some spoilers about the strange twists, but the setup couldn’t be clearer. In a Travelodge hotel room, a couple wakes up after a one-night stand. She’s in the bathroom. He devours a bucket of KFC for breakfast. When she gets out, Mary (Karen Perry star Lauren Lyle) licks her lips and relishes her mind-blowing sex narrative while Hoosier Mike (Skins’ Alexander Arnold) reserves the orgasmic joy for drumsticks. “Last night wasn’t great,” I asked her. “It was something else,” he replies, and after half an hour we find out what he means.

Far from a casual encounter, this one-night stand is the result of separate missions. Mary spent months sleeping with different men in order to get pregnant. Mike, increasingly suspicious of his apparent naivety, reveals that he was sent for just this job. This is pretty much an obligation – he planned the idea like a business trip.

Beneath the bizarre comedy of misunderstandings and some mysterious presence (mostly Mary), Ireland considers, if only in passing, similar issues of secular and religious faith, assertion, self-confidence, and absolute good faith, in his latest book, The Fifth Step. The lightness of the relationship between Lyle and Arnold means that the seriousness isn’t always apparent, but they remain a compelling double act as they move the sand. Each character has moments of poignant tenderness, especially regarding the gift of Mary’s pregnancy, amid gags revolving around each other’s very different worlds. Together they capture the awkward mix of intimacy and anonymity the next morning, heightened by Ceci Calf’s set, characterized by appropriately muted colors and a stuffy air (the curtains open to reveal the enchanting view of a brick wall).

The humor is by no means as outlandish as the Irish black comedies Ulster American or Cyprus Avenue, and Max Elton’s production might have benefited from borrowing more from the turbulent, uneasy feeling of the fringes. In what could almost be a TV pilot, the screenplay is presented with the flourishes of a tall tale but offers a powerfully serious consideration of the divine and the very human. Its origins lie in a series of “dream plays” that Travers conceived in Edinburgh to allow playwrights to realize ideas that would otherwise have been unthinkable. At 45 minutes, the result is funny and chewy but leaves you craving more.