Luka is looking to take steps to change his life. He is young, lonely and confused, feeling in need of a parental figure, a woman, sex, a job and understanding. When he embarks on Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12 Steps Programme, he will get these, but not always in the way intended.
It will certainly change him, his thoughts, behaviours and relationships but it will also bring revelations and an unintentional spiritual housecleaning.
Having admitted he has a problem around alcohol he seeks help from the older and seemingly wiser James as a sponsor and mentor. The process will involve him making a moral inventory of all the bad things he has done and sharing this to make amends. It’s a bit like confession he suggests, but James, “a recovering Catholic” sees the Programmes’ “one ultimate authority” as more spiritual than religious, a “God of his own understanding”, baffling Luka with the suggestion that God could be a paper cup.
Their sharing brings up issues around their fathers, neither positive influences, and James feels that Luka has trouble trusting older men, in need of a role model who won’t muck him about. James prides himself on having stepped up to being an open, attentive father and loving husband but part of the journey is accessing the inner child again, and this mixed with religion proves a poisonous cocktail for James.
Luka has more than his share of addictions as he confesses to wanking twenty times a day while watching porn. James suggests that it might be healthier to busy his hands with knitting (popular with nuns) or lifting weights. This leads to Luka’s unexpected spiritual awakening in the form of seeing Jesus in the gym (although it might be actor Willem Dafoe). One way or another he finds a new obsession with the bible, which could be progress if he wasn’t having sex with a married older woman from the church. It seems like one step forwards and one back as James points out that it is unchristian at best.
Ultimately James will be revealed as less accepting and liberal when truths come home to roost and Luka’s Fifth Step list of resentments makes uncomfortable reading.
This absorbing drama moves powerfully from humorous to darkly tense in the expert hands of Lowden as the twitchy Luka and Gilder as the laid-back but increasingly apoplectic James.
The stylish set revolves to reveal meeting space, café (where the lights of passing cars sweep across the window), hothouse, gym and hospital, as we predict the next step only to have it twist away. As Luka works with boundaries, he kicks out and removes wall panels opening the set. The slick execution is oddly broken in the latter stages by stagehands visibly removing props and a rabbit costume left off set but in sight like a pookah.
The play has almost as many strands as Steps as it looks at everything from toxic masculinity, boundaries, parenting, generational gaps, intimacy, trust, communication, religion, shame, and of course to drinking culture and addiction. The constant questioning around homosexuality seems clumsy. Like James it doesn’t have all the answers.
Show times: 21 to 25 August 2024 at 7.30pm. (23 BSL interpreted, 25 captioned).
Tickets: £20 (£14) to £94 (£47) (other concessions available).
Suitability: Contains flashing lights, strong language and discussion of sex, sexual assault, violence, mental illness and alcoholism.
Note: The production will tour to the Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow 28 to 31 August 2024.