As I was contemplating what qualities it takes to make a good actor for a Substack post I began thinking about The Fifth Step, recently performed at @sohoplace, and currently being transmitted in cinemas as part of NT Live.

It’s a two-hander about a young man called Luka and his AA sponsor, James, whose job it is to wean the younger man away from alcohol. It’s written from personal experience by the Irish playwright David Ireland, whose Cyprus Avenue I remember well at the Royal Court Theatre many years ago.

It’s a wonderful play. Set in the round with minimal furniture, it’s just the two men, arguing, bantering, finding common ground and then losing it again. When Luka, played by Jack Lowden, replaces his obsession with alcohol and sex with God and the bible, James, played by Martin Freeman, is every bit as appalled as he was by Luka’s alcoholism. But when the tables turn, as they tend to do with most plays featuring a counsellor and a counselled, and the focus switches to James’s honesty, or lack of, it’s very far from the cliche one might expect.

But the real revelation, for me, was Jack Lowden, best known for playing River Cartwright in Slow Horses but who, it appears, I have seen on stage before way back when in Black Watch and Chariots of Fire. The good-looking and dapper young man we all know and love is transformed here into the near-feral Luka, whose barely-suppressed energy gives him the appearance of a much larger man, a twitchy obsessive – whether it’s alcohol or God – only just holding things together, the sort of person you’d love to meet but not on your own in a dark alley.

Now that, I have to say to myself, is great acting: the ability to transform oneself so completely as to be almost unrecognisable. It’s also I would argue the sort of thing you only see in a theatre. Films and TV simply don’t offer actors that kind of opportunity.

All credit too to Martin Freeman, who as someone else pointed out is the master of perplexed bemusement. He is every bit as watchable as Lowden, if not quite so surprising.

The Fifth Step is currently being transmitted in cinemas around the country. I really recommend it.

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