Never mind the manosphere: The Fifth Step depicts genuine male intimacy and brutal vulnerability - Daily Maverick

A dark comedy about male despair, addiction, loneliness and the possibility of spiritual awakening in a seemingly godless world is showing at The Baxter in Cape Town until 26 September.

According to proponents of the 12-step addiction treatment programme adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous in 1939, God can be whatever “higher power” you choose to believe in.

In The Fifth Step, an electric, fast-paced, idea-filled play by Belfast-raised, Glasgow-based playwright David Ireland, God might be a coffee cup, Jesus could be Willem Dafoe. These are not blasphemous ideas, however, but the play’s two male protagonists attempting to wrap their heads around notions of belief and spirituality.

The play, which debuted at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2024, is in many ways an exploration of Ireland’s questions around religion and written in the context of his own late-in-life spiritual awakening, having re-embraced Christianity in his 40s.

Ireland’s own encounter with AA happened much earlier in his career, when he stopped drinking at 23, having gone, he says, “straight to whisky” as a 14-year-old. Now 50, Ireland says he tried AA not because he needed help quitting booze or with staying away from drink, but in order to deal with the loneliness of his sobriety. He found, though, that the 12-step programme wasn’t for him.

Certainly, the meetings he did attend – and the fears that had arisen for him around how he’d socialise and how he’d find a girlfriend without the lubricating effect of alcohol – became part of the autobiographical impetus for this play, written about 25 years after he last had a drink.

And who knew that sobriety could be such an efficient pressure-cooker for such an exquisitely detailed survey of male fears, frustrations and emotions?

In The Fifth Step, two recovering alcoholics dance around their mutual trust issues, their shame, their belief systems and their different responses to the kinds of loneliness they find themselves gripped by.

The play, which builds through a series of sometimes awkward, sometimes touching and ultimately angry encounters, is full of questions. And while it doesn’t purport to have all the answers, it does illuminate some precious truths.

It’s being staged in Cape Town at The Baxter’s intimate upstairs Studio theatre, a space in which it’s difficult not to feel as though we’re right there, in the AA meeting room alongside the characters.

The stuff they share is extremely intimate, almost cringey at times, and yet the atmosphere conjured by Charmaine Weir-Smith’s gentle directorial hand makes the men’s mutual confessions and admissions feel beautifully unforced, honest and deeply moving.

They discuss and debate everything from porn addiction and sex with Milfs, to homosexual attraction, marital infidelity, paedophilia in the Catholic church, and the damage inflicted on children in homes headed by violent, abusive fathers.

Albert Pretorius plays the older, presumably wiser AA veteran who sets out to counsel and mentor the younger (and evidently hornier, lonelier and more suicidal) newbie recovering addict played by Lyle October.

What they discover about one another – and about themselves – in the process of tearing off the various layers of guilt and opprobrium they live with daily, is the real substance of a play that is funny in the extreme but ultimately touches some very real, raw nerves as it prompts us to consider the possibility of spiritual awakening in an ever more secular world.

On the surface of it, the two recovering alcoholics could not be more different. Pretorius’ James is married, resolutely not religious, and perhaps a little too calm and controlled to really have everything under control. October’s Luka, on the other hand, is suicidally lonely and emotionally all over the place. He’s as much broken by circumstance as he is by a lack of sex and companionship, and of course he has that Guinness World Records-sized masturbation problem.

But as their friendship evolves and the impressionable Luka resolves to follow all of James’ fatherly advice, truths and lies emerge and the resulting conflict makes for some unexpected, yet perhaps inevitable, violence. 

There’s tremendous chemistry between the two actors, a kind of delicate frisson that neatly balances comedy and pathos, kindness and rage. It’s there whether they’re politely observing social civility, tiptoeing around one another as they size each other up, trying to calm one another down during their stormiest moments, or finding themselves tearing up because a sensitive nerve has been touched.

There’s a ritualistic dimension, too, as though the play wants us to witness in real time the characters reluctantly removing their respective veils of shame as they expose their innermost truths.

Ireland’s writing is inventive, shockingly funny and brimming with expletives. There is no sparing of manners or sensitivities.

Yet, while it starts out with Luka declaring that he might be an “incel”, this is not a play trying to be trendy. There is no Andrew Tate manosphere backdrop against which these two men argue over competing worldviews.

Instead it offers honest, sometimes disturbing insight into what it might be like for two men from very different contexts to feel safe enough to unburden themselves when they’re at their most exposed, vulnerable, broken and unhinged. 

And, when the play culminates with a clever deus ex machina-like instance of very simple theatrical whimsy, it is first briefly confusing and then deeply profound, a clever “a-ha!” twist designed to help dislodge itself from the purely rational while simultaneously ensuring that the play’s ideas remain with you long after you leave the theatre.

Apart from the play’s dark humour and clever repartee, its moments of surreal fantasy and the forehead-furrowing exploration of existential conundrums, I was especially gripped by the performances. 

As individual actors, Pretorius and October are dynamite, but the electricity they generate when they’re together on stage takes this production to another level. They’re remarkably agile performers, both with a serious talent for briskly transforming one emotion into its opposite in order to let us glimpse the fragility of deeply flawed, deeply human characters.

By the end of it all, while I cared for both of them, what I could not shake was just how much I yearned for their friendship – their unique, one-of-a-kind human connection – to endure. DM

The Fifth Step is playing at The Baxter’s Studio theatre until 26 September.