Review: The Fifth Step, The Outrun, I Wish You Well, Gwyneth Goes Skiing

There are piquant pairings in the city of Jekyll and Hyde. In the international festival, two plays about addiction and recovery can be found. On the fringe, two shows explore what might be considered the opposite: Gwyneth Paltrow.

David Ireland’s new drama, The Fifth Step, directed by Finn den Hertog for the National Theatre of Scotland, bursts onto the stage with a blend of comedy and grimness, hallucination and naturalism. In Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue (2016), a man believes his baby granddaughter is Gerry Adams. In The Fifth Step, the focus is on the exchanges between a young man (Jack Lowden) who has recently joined AA and his older mentor (Sean Gilder). Like Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things, this play suggests that addiction is part of the basic condition of being human.

In the fifth step of the AA programme, people share with their sponsors a “moral inventory,” listing the bad things they have done to shake off shame. Ireland masterfully portrays confession as a part of addiction and as itself addictive. The conversations between the characters are free-ranging, compelling, and occasionally meandering. They discuss the young man’s obsessions: his father (whom he detests), his habit of masturbating 20 times a day, his fascination with violent movies, and his fitness routine. Suddenly, Jesus appears beside him on the treadmill at the gym, resembling Willem Dafoe with soft hands like those of “a sad child.”

The power dynamics between the men shift throughout the play. In a moment both thrilling and somewhat overstated, the plain, institutional meeting rooms and cafes of Milla Clarke’s set design are dismantled and rearranged by Lowden, mirroring the waning authority of his mentor. The two actors subtly and effectively portray these changes. Gilder starts off bluff and relaxed, only to implode as secrets are revealed, anger flooding his face. Lowden, initially avoiding human contact with lightly clenched fists, eventually stops appearing lopsided and becomes more solid. For a brief moment, he seems merely wholesome, but nothing is mere in Ireland’s world.

Lowden is a versatile presence in Edinburgh, both as an actor and as a co-producer with his wife, Saoirse Ronan, of the film The Outrun, based on Amy Liptrot’s memoir. Additionally, a clever adaptation of The Outrun by Stef Smith is staged by Vicky Featherstone, founding artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland.

This adaptation of Liptrot’s memoir has no right to succeed, considering the original’s power lies in its fusion of her feelings with the Orkney landscape. Liptrot grew up amidst wind-whipped open spaces, sheer drops, and an imposing ocean—a girl unafraid of heights. While Lewis den Hertog’s videos swirl with cloud, mist, and stars, the set design by Milla Clarke—a wooden sauna-like box on a hillocky stage—cannot fully convey the land’s vastness. Featherstone and Smith instead delve into Liptrot’s inner tumult.

Luke Sutherland, who grew up in Orkney, composed music that evokes both temptation and possibility. Voices rise and fall like waves, nagging sweetly like addiction, while techno beats underscore the buzz of the heroine’s London life, where she parties, falls in love, and alienates her partner with her elusiveness and drunken escapades. Isis Hainsworth excels in her role, embodying both Liptrot’s recklessness and resilience without a hint of self-admiration or public remorse.

On the fringe, two shows have zeroed in on Gwyneth Paltrow’s courtroom spat with an optometrist, who accused her of crashing into him on the ski slopes, leaving him a fractured mess. However, Paltrow, who won the case, claimed she lost half a day of skiing and felt “icky.”

The musical I Wish You Well: The Gwyneth Paltrow Ski-Trial Musical, directed by Shiv Rabheru, is an amusing, tuneful rendition of this court case. Diana Vickers portrays a skinny, energetic Paltrow, while Marc Antolin plays the optometrist who desperately seeks fame. Idriss Kargbo, as the judge, adds to the humor with his sequined dance routines. The highlight is Tori Allen-Martin’s performance as the lawyer representing the optometrist, who has a “passion for high court fashion” and secretly desires to be more than friends with Paltrow.

Meanwhile, Awkward Productions’ two-hander Gwyneth Goes Skiing, written and performed by Linus Karp and Joseph Martin, is equally gay but less buoyant. It is a jaunty yet extended piece of satire, involving audience participation and a video appearance by drag queen Trixie Mattel. Linus Karp’s portrayal of Paltrow captures her essence with a wide smile, wafting hands, and exaggerated hair swishing.

Both shows incorporate verbatim dialogues from the actual trial, emphasizing the absurdity of the situation, where celebrity and money make everyone appear ridiculous, and Paltrow becomes almost trivial.

Star ratings (out of five)
The Fifth Step ★★★★
The Outrun ★★★
I Wish You Well: The Gwyneth Paltrow Ski-Trial Musical ★★★★
Gwyneth Goes Skiing ★★★

Source: The Guardian, Particle News