While less dedicated or prolific writers were off boozing with their mates down the local, Roddy Doyle has spent almost a decade writing about it. From 2012-2019, he published three novels – Two Pints,Two More Pints, Two for the Road – in which two sixtysomething Irish men chatted over Guinness, their alcohol units far beyond those specified in the titles.
Comprising only dialogue without even character names, the books seemed to call for dramatic form and, in 2017, Doyle premiered a play titled Two Pints in a Dublin pub, the speakers now distinguished as One and Two, tended by Raymond, an almost-silent barman. During lockdown, Doyle added six online duologues, The Zoom Pints, in which the men spoke while drinking alone at home. The collected craic packs a 432-page paperback – The Complete Two Pints.
The theatrical banter is now revived in Coventry, and lightly updated to post-Covid Ireland. Summoned by bells from the Belgrade theatre bar, we double-take at a near replica – similar optics and crisp packets – though in reverse: Claire Winfield’s set puts us behind the beer pumps, facing the drinkers. One (Anthony Brophy) is wiry, sarcastic, the drink a relief after visiting his dying father at a nearby hospital. Two (Sean Kearns), often the butt of jokes, is whimsical, quieter but also, we may come to feel, wiser.
The conversations tend to fantasy, often involving women they like on television. They cast and review imaginary TV series, including Celebrity Car Park Attendant, in which Nigella Lawson is their favourite ticket vigilante. Another shared passion – football – informs a reverie about which famous players they would and wouldn’t like to meet if there is an afterlife. In which conversation, the “if” is the biggie, the laddish chat gradually overtaken by questions of life and death and the sins of the Irish Catholic church, made urgent by the condition of One’s father.
As proved by the easy adaptability of his novels to the screen – The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van – Doyle has an unusual facility with dialogue and gags, which the actors grace. When Brophy remembers the pub raising money “to send the under-17 girls to Korea”, Kearns, after a perfectly held pause, queries: “Did they ever come back?” A reference to Ave Maria being sung at a funeral somehow moves via the Andrews Sisters to deep family memories.
Some may resist the sweariness of the banter – the two words most likely to be bleeped on TV are as common as conjunctions – or its insistent masculinity, although Doyle and director Sara Joyce aren’t necessarily endorsing this or expecting the audience to do so. But this is a masterclass in comedy writing and acting.
AtBelgrade theatre, Coventry, until 24 May