REVIEW: TWO by Jim Cartwright at Greenwich Theatre until 21 September 2025
‘Inventive, funny, sad ’ ★★★★
Pubs and theatres, as the title of our magazine implies, go together like ham and eggs, and Jim Cartwright’s 1989 play marries the pair as an ideal Two. More ideal certainly than the married pair at the heart of the play, the landlord and landlady of a busy pub who play mine host and hostess for their host of customers while privately bickering over a secret sorrow that has both of them hitting the spirits optics as often as the keys to the till.
Cartwright’s play features 14 characters in all, each of them played by two actors (Kellie Shirley and Peter Caulfield). This version is also performed not in Greenwich Theatre’s auditorium but in its downstairs bar and studio space, allowing director James Haddrell (the theatre’s long-time artistic director) to make it so fully immersive you may on arrival (spoiler alert) find one of the actors behind the bar serving your pre-show drink.
It's a great choice – the use of a real bar and its tables gives the two performers every opportunity to be fully grounded in Cartwright’s pub, a bar with room for mismatched couples, lonely singles, comedy, tragedy, duologue, soliloquy, as they collect glasses, ashtrays, deliver drinks, banter with ‘customers’.
Both actors are high-energy from the off, with Caulfield particularly hilarious as an ageing would-be lothario with a bad back and genuinely chilling as a superficially charming controlling husband/boyfriend. Shirley ranges from flirtatious barmaid to sad older woman taking a break from caring for her bedridden husband, and both achieve quick character changes with the help of simple costume markers and a range of accents. Impressive that both location and design leave maximum space for the actors to find the multiple characters each has to play.
The show’s not dissimilar in style from what the Coach and Horses up in Soho’s been doing for a few years with Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, and the decision to use the 40-50-seat bar space rather than the 400-seat upstairs theatre is artistically smart. The initial run’s also been extended to 21 September, ticket sales presumably being encouraging. A popular ‘80s soundtrack featuring Eurythmics, Madness and more (plus a segue to ‘70s Led Zeppelin for the ‘stag party’, a nice added aural gag) helps set the play where Cartwright wrote it, in a working-class northern pub of the old style.
Inventive, funny, sad, and with an ending that dances the right side of predictable and mawkish once last orders have rung and the two at the heart of the play are at last with only each other and their heartache.
Read LPT interview with director James Haddrell here
TWO by Jim Cartwright
Directed by James Haddrell
Greenwich Theatre 21 Aug - 21 Sept 2025
Box Office: https://greenwichtheatre.org.uk/events/two/
Cast: KELLIE SHIRLEY and PETER CAULFIELD
Reviewer: David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow) and Better Together (Jack Studio, Brockley, London).
