TWO Review: A Pint of Bitter

TWO is a play about love, loss and betrayal – and Mermaids’ latest rendition left me suspended between laughter and stunned melancholy. Jim Cartwright’s script unfolds in a small-town pub, the lives of its drinkers and owners revealing the quiet tragedies behind everyday love. As I sat in the buzzing Barron for the opening night performance, my expectations were blank. The cartoonish set — a bar drawn in thick, newspaper-like outlines, with matching chairs and an all-green wall of bottles glowing behind — immediately caught my eye. The playful aesthetic would soon become something darker: under the shifting green and yellow light, this cheerful pub became a claustrophobic world where tenderness and cruelty intertwine.

A green light hovers over the stage even in darkness until the bar opens, warm yellow light joining to brighten the space as we first meet the two landlords. Two became four, four became eight, and so on, as the stage filled with bar-goers all dressed and accented in green. This homogeneity, combined with the customers’ silence and the barkeepers’ commotion effectively builds a small world, in which this pub feels central.

When the stage empties, next to appear is an old woman with a startlingly thick southern accent, portrayed by Emma Smicklas. She establishes the play’s tone of romantic cynicism through a monologue dense with grisly, ‘bloody’ (a word she is fond of) imagery that undercuts sentimental notions of love. Emma’s direct address plants in the audience a sticky uneasiness as she exits, the green light stinging the stage like a hangover.

This unease deepens in the following scene, when Moth first speaks. Sacha Threipland strongly portrays him as a sleazy, obsessive character, his voice pitched somewhere between comedic and disturbing. As his eyes wander from woman to woman, his slow, drawling declarations of love extend the women’s claustrophobia to the audience. His name is effective as he searches for light in each woman, flitting between, though the symbolism might have landed more clearly had it been emphasised.

The landlords’ zooms us out, their melancholy thickening as they watch scenes of romance unfold off-stage. A friction between them gradually lodges itself in our throats. Ruby Thake, as the landlady, embodies this tension in her distant exchanges and strained physicality: unable to hold a glass without gripping too tightly, strain seems to sizzle from her fingers. Her agitation evaporates the moment the Landlord exits, revealing its tie to him. Left alone, she laments over her ‘loveless bed to lie in,’ offering our first glimpse of the pain beneath her composure.

Martha Thomson as Lesley delivers one of the night’s standout performances. Her introductory monologue is shamelessly funny and outrageous, an ode to ‘big men’ that crescendos in a borderline orgasmic matter. Her eyes wide and arms outstretched, we feel as though we bear witness to her most private fantasies. This, interrupted with the outward mocking of her timid partner as ‘small’, is both hilarious and cruel, encapsulating the performance’s blend of humour and cynicism. This brash energy collapses when we see her with her new partner, Roy, the ‘big man’ she idolised – in a chillingly abusive relationship. Alongside Roy’s menacing quiet control, played masterfully by Ezequiel Vigo, Lesley performs the timidity that so disgusted her, embodying a bitten tongue through her stuttering fear. The scene ends with a shocking blow, the audience stunned into a sharp silence as the stage goes dark, leaving us to sit with the sourness.

At TWO’s core is, indeed, two: the landlord and landlady who open and close the play with their barbed affection. Their relationship anchors the production’s exploration of unspoken grief and romantic disillusionment. Michael Griffith’s Landlord is a weary figure, his realism grounding the bar’s chaos, while the brittle anger that Ruby’s Landlady carries hints at something deeper. The unspoken hangs stale between them, trailing a melancholy thread through the play. When their loss — the death of their seven-year-old son — is finally revealed, it recontextualises their bitterness as shared grief. The final scene releases the long-held tension into quiet, sad, tenderness.

As the lights dim, the couple utter ‘I love you’ in the dark, and the Barron falls silent. The comic cynicism that dominated the evening dissolves into something fragile and human. Beside me, a woman begins to cry, and the sound feels entirely fitting — the production has turned the small, cartoonish pub into a space of raw, unguarded emotion. Mermaids’ TWO captures the uneasy coexistence of humour and heartbreak that defines Cartwright’s play, leaving its audience hushed, reflective, and deeply moved long after the lights fade.