A Step out of time

Two Step does not so much require the suspension of disbelief as the complete abandonment of it. The actor Rhashan Stone, whose first, disappointing play this is, imagines what happens when Mona opens the door to married Lenny who left her in the pregnant lurch 32 years ago. This visitor arrives flashing new teeth, new clothes and a new life-attitude, thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous and a college education. The situation has more than a flicker of dramatic potential about it.

What draws Lenny back to Mona, whose unsound mind regularly imagines into threatening adult life the foetus that she long ago aborted? The unconvincing answer has to do with the fact that AA requires its recovering members to make amends for what they have done to people with whom they were involved in the past.

Since Lenny, unbelievably, does not realise what damaging impact he has had upon Mona's life, Two Step becomes a dragging, laboured plod of a play in futile search of a purpose. The couple scarcely engage. They do not come to recriminating or revelatory grips, though Mona flirts a little and smug Lenny, who tends to speak in the jargon of self-help therapy, downs some alcohol and, after one of their aimless meetings, stays the night.

The purposeless appearance of Lenny's son, played on a single note of sulky resentment by Ricci McLeod, underlines Stone's inability to allow Two Step to move forward. The Revenge denouement, with its elements of misogynistic cruelty, strikes a gratuitously distasteful note.

Josette Bushell-Mingo's production, launching the Push 04 Almeida season of Black British theatre, opera and ballet, is played on an over-elaborate stage-set festooned with suspended window frames and a bed hanging in mid-air.

The actors cannot be blamed for failing to breathe life into characters under-developed to the point of emaciation. Dona Croll's Mona, whose West Indian accent comes and mainly goes, flits between moods of hallucinatory panic and seductive nonchalance while Derek Griffiths's Lenny remains ponderously affected.

Two Steps Forward One Step Back: Contemporary Art In Pakistan Since 1980: Lecture