Two’s tedious company

TWO, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester
Just as Walter Greenwood documented the bleak existence of lower-class living in Love on the Dole and the fun of it in Saturday Night at the Crown, Farnworth playwright Jim Cartwright has done the same thing with Road and with this play, like Crown, set in a traditional boozer.

Greenwood celebrated the rumbustious life of working-class Fifties Britain, pretty much based around the pub. Cartwright, writing only 40 years later, had no idea he was presiding over the early death throes of the institution. Greenwood’s play is long and packed with characters and incident; Cartwright’s is short — you’re out of the place by 9.25pm — and yet occasionally seems longer.

At least it does in this production, which despite the jocular presence of top comedian and actor Justin Moorhouse and fine character actress Victoria Elliott, has some of the spirit dragged out of it by director Greg Hersov’s slightly slow pace.

Cartwright famously engineers high comedy and low nastiness into his plays with a poetic dialogue shorthand that works best when delivered with more liveliness than it is here.

The play is also, historically, at slight fault. It has the air of a story without a beginning or end; more soap opera than drama.

The characters are all played by Moorhouse and Elliott, courtesy of a script that takes them on or off stage to change as unobtrusively as Ayckbourn might organise it.

There’s the loveable, dress-alike halfwits; the old lady, whose drink is respite from caring for her disabled husband; the old widower whose drink is part of a nightly communion with his dead wife; deadbeat lothario Moth and his long-suffering girlfriend; the abandoned mistress, in the pub to seeth at her lover’s wife, and the scummy Roy, whose inadequacy has him terrorise his submissive partner in the play’s creepiest turn, one strangely ill-at-ease with the charm of the rest of the characters.

Without an over-arching story this parade of characters can get a little tedious at times, since few of them are terribly profound or dynamic. But the actors are well worth watching, especially as the landlords’ personal tragedy comes clear in the second half.