“The Fifth Step” and the ideal comedy

I don’t think I’ve ever done this, and I did it on my sixtieth birthday. We arrived at Heathrow on the 12th of May at midday and went to Tottenham Court Road on the Elizabeth line, checked in to our hotel and went for a Chinese meal sitting outside in the sun with Prosecco. After the habitual short visit to Trafalgar Square – where I finally managed to shoot the perfect photo from the National Gallery terrasse – we returned to the hotel, then went on across the street to the new Soho Place Theatre where we sat outside in the sun with a drink to wait for the performance – so far nothing I have never experienced. The perfect day would have been just one of many ordinary perfect days in London, if it hadn’t been made special by seeing the PERFECT comedy. This I must have done as well, though I don’t remember the occasion, because I knew the experience. But this time I had accidentally picked the first preview, which I only became aware of when we came to the theatre, and there was a tingling in the air. The audience was full of expectations and extremely excitable, and I guess the actors were highly strung too, nervous about playing this for an audience for the first time. Of course this is usually a big moment, but comedy is “high risk” theatre, it ia existential to get the audience on board from the start and all the way through. There might be a very short interval from the first sentence of the play until the audience “kicks in”, but it has to be very short – or non-existent, as in this case. From the moment Jack Lowden uttered his first sentence: “I think I might be an incel”, we knew that David Ireland had known exactly what he was doing, and that the actors knew exactly what they were doing, and they never lost us for a second. As it is some time now that I have seen this, I am extremely grateful for the unusually substantial programme. I always buy them, as a reminder, but most of the time nothing that is written in them is worth the paper it is written on, let alone five pounds. This time I could actually use the actor’s interview to reconnect with my experience.

 

Strictly speaking, “The Fifth Step” isn’t even a comedy, it’s just “a play”. Of course we don’t need these labels anymore, and the audience knows best anyway. When Luke said: “I think I may be an incel” EVERYBODY LAUGHED. Historically, a tragedy was a play that ends with a violent death and a comedy a play that ends with a marriage. The label triggered the expectation of the audience who kind of knew what was expected of them. But how did WE know what was expected of us, and why was it so easy to comply? As such, “I think I may be an incel” is not a funny sentence. Or are there even any funny sentences “as such”? It’s all in the context, and where “comedy” is concerned, “we” practically ARE the context. Apart from being so satisfying, the COMIC EXPERIENCE is about taking the audience extremely seriously. Without us in the stalls comedy is dead in the water. And laughing is an extremely social activity. At least it works much better in company. Laughter is contagious, nonetheless EVERYBODY laughed hearing that FIRST sentence … No answers, but I guess it’s because the audience is such a substantial part of the comic experience that there is no “recipe” for comedy. There is this expectation that we are going to see something funny, and there are the people to make it happen – author, director, actors. The people who know – or hope they know – what they are doing.

 

“Funny” again is a more than questionable term under the circumstances. The introduction David Ireland wrote about his experience leading to the play being written is kind of shocking. Not surprising, though, because I am used to having this sublime comic experience only with plays about the darkest aspects of human life. “The Fifth Step” – the thematic centre of the play – would be my personal nightmare the anticipation of which alone has certainly contributed to keeping me on the straight and narrow: the moment in the process of dealing with one’s addiction where one has to CONFESS one’s hardships, resentments, and the guilt one feels about the harm one has caused. That means: being TRUTHFUL about one’s own life and feelings where it is most difficult to confront this truth. One can kick off comedy with a surprising sentence, but one cannot go on like that and expect to keep the audience on board. The perfect comedy goes much deeper than even a very good joke.

 

On the stage THERE’S NOWHERE TO HIDE …

 

Reading the interview with the actors, I was fascinated how much they were able to take “us” into the process of making this play. Martin Freeman said that, reading the play, he was instantly convinced that he wanted to do this. But he wouldn’t have said yes without knowing who his partner was, and that he trusted Jack Lowden. Jack Lowden, who had already played Luke in the Scottish premiere of the play, was excited to do this with Martin Freeman, one of his acting heroes, and instantly started to look at the play IN A DEEPER WAY. I guess it is not just the obvious fact that, if there are just two actors on a stage, they are extremely dependant on each other, but that great comedy is really about exploring these depths of our existence in the most uncompromising way. And, in a case like this, you cannot do this on your own. You need other people, a group, a sponsor. Great comedy is probably not really about jokes and fun – it is mostly about exploring these impossible situations SOCIALLY, and how this actually changes everything because being sincere about things like this is not just difficult, it is impossible. At best, it is a PROCESS - something that has to be gone through without knowing what will happen and how it will end. And – most importantly – a process that totally depends on the person you are doing this with because they will also be fallible and insincere and needy and more or less everything you are yourself. It is the DYNAMICS of this process that is responsible for the great comic experience. To be constantly surprised by the absurd ways and the virtual impossibility of “us” getting our shit together. On a bare stage, unlike in real life, there is nowhere to hide and nothing can be hidden. I guess, deep inside we are aware that the deepest issues in our lives are unresolved – and unresolvable - and there is a deep, LIBERATING, absurd satisfaction in owning up to it.