THEATRE REVIEW: Never mind the manosphere: The Fifth Step depicts genuine male intimacy and brutal vulnerability

A dark comedy about male despair, addiction, loneliness and the possibility of spiritual awakening in a seemingly godless world is showing at The Baxter in Cape Town until 23 September.

According to proponents of the 12-step addiction treatment programme adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous in 1939, God can be whatever “higher power” you choose to believe in.

In The Fifth Step , an electric, fast-paced, idea-filled play by Belfast-raised, Glasgow-based playwright David Ireland, God might be a coffee cup, Jesus could be Willem Dafoe. These are not blasphemous ideas, however, but the play’s two male protagonists attempting to wrap their heads around notions of belief and spirituality.

The play, which debuted at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2024, is in many ways an exploration of Ireland’s questions around religion and written in the context of his own late-in-life spiritual awakening, having re-embraced Christianity in his 40s.

Ireland’s own encounter with AA happened much earlier in his career, when he stopped drinking at 23, having gone, he says, “straight to whisky” as a 14-year-old. Now 50, Ireland says he tried AA not because he needed help quitting booze or with staying away from drink, but in order to deal with the loneliness of his sobriety. He found, though, that the 12-step programme wasn’t for him.

Certainly, the meetings he did attend – and the fears that had arisen for him around how he’d socialise and how he’d find a girlfriend without the lubricating effect of alcohol – became part of the autobiographical impetus for this play, written about 25 years after he last had a drink.

And who knew that sobriety could be such an efficient pressure-cooker for such an exquisitely detailed survey of male fears, frustrations and emotions?

In The Fifth Step, two recovering alcoholics dance around their mutual trust issues, their shame, their belief systems and their different responses to the kinds of loneliness they find themselves gripped by.

The play, which builds through a series of sometimes awkward, sometimes touching and ultimately angry encounters, is full of questions.