Godfrey Hamilton's text of this latest sample of Starving Artists' presentation of lonesome Americans searching for their place in life is every bit as brilliantly funny and perceptively touching as was the earlier Road Movie (seen at last year's Dublin Theatre Festival in the Peacock Theatre) when it is couched in monologue. But, given that it is centred on people who fail to communicate with one another, it is innately much less dramatically effective when it turns to the duologue between Curtis, a discombobulated homosexual, and Cricket, a bisexual being who cares for drunks. What they have in common is their search for somewhere satisfying and the fact that they are both alcoholic. But their individual demons are their personal secrets: "we're as sick as the secrets we keep".
When the duologue tries to explore or reveal those secrets it stumbles dramatically because each is unwilling to reveal secrets to the other. In separate monologues, the loneliness and the terror are excellently and wittily displayed. But the final mutual expressions of need for one another in caring about each other's alcoholism seem like a romantic dramatic contrivance rather than a genuine catharsis.
What lifts the evening above the ordinary is the energy of the performances by Mark Pinkosh and Kathryn Howden as the two disparate waifs who never seem to know just how they got to where they are. Breathlessly tempered with theatrical skill, each of them paints pictures of disconnected lives in a hostile world. The pictures always seem truthful and touching, even in such distancing cocoons as a passion for old black-and-white Hollywood movies. Sometimes Lorenzo Mele's direction regrettably allows the two actors to sink out of sight on to the floor of the stage (Andrews Lane audience sightlines do not allow for such indulgence) and often Douglas Kuhrt's lighting design lets their faces veer off into relative darkness. But their energy and their emotional precision keep the entertainment on track to provide 90 interval-free minutes of rewarding theatre.
Runs until Saturday
