3 weeks ago
20
Your standard group-therapy drama involves people sitting in a circle revealing the trauma that put them on the path to addiction. Playwrights Stephen Christopher and Graeme Smith are having none of that.
Any time someone threatens us with a backstory in this funny and heartening three-hander, they halt the action with a meta-theatrical flourish and put us back on track. Too much trawling through the past, says one character, and we’ll be blaming everything on medieval serfs.
Causes, then, are put aside. What we do know is that 40-year-old Craig (Ross Allan) has a history with drugs, perhaps not so different to that of the younger Jay (Craig Mclean), and that Donny (Stephen Docherty), a man in his 60s, still feeling the loss of his mother, can get through several bottles of wine and spirits in a day.
As Gareth Southgate puts toxic masculinity back in the headlines, here are men being vulnerable, scared and supportive. They take fright at being referred to as friends (too intimate), but look out for each other as only those who understand weakness can. They are also very funny.
In his inaugural season at A Play, a Pie and a Pint, Guardian journalist Brian Logan directs with a keen eye for physical comedy, not least when Donny confesses his secret love of dancing. Thanks to the camera-happy Jay, he turns into #DancingDonny, an internet sensation with 1.5m online hits. It could all go terribly wrong, yet this man who knows nothing of social media somehow straddles the generational divide to find solace in real life.
Like Dorothy in her ruby slippers, he finds magic in his red shoes. Like the Ugly Duckling, he risks ridicule to show his true self. In a brilliant performance, Docherty combines earnestly clunky moves with unselfconscious joy. The audience cheers him on.
