My first visit to Shakespeare North in Prescot felt oddly close to home. It’s not far from where I grew up, though Prescot itself always felt like another world. Jim Cartwright’s Two has also travelled a long road since its first staging in the 1980s, but for me and the artist I went with it was completely new. We walked in without history, meeting the play as if it had just been written.
The building, though, carries history everywhere. Prescot was home to the only Shakespearean theatre outside London in the late 16th century, something the venue happily reminds visitors of with a poster in the lobby asking, ‘Shakespeare and Prescot – really?’ The answer, it turns out, is yes. The modern playhouse nods to that past, drawing inspiration from the last indoor Shakespeare theatre built in Whitehall, once located beneath what is now 10 Downing Street. Sitting there later, it struck me that Cartwright’s play also unfolds beneath Downing Street in a way: lives lived below the line of power, people getting by, never sure how or why, and almost always unseen.
Before the performance we booked into the theatre’s Bar & Kitchen, temporarily transformed into the Shakespeare Free House for the run of Two. Theatre seems fond of faux pubs lately. Sometimes they work, sometimes they feel a little staged, the idea of the boozer recreated but without the thing that makes it real. The Aviva working men’s club and the Royal Exchange’s Millstone for Cartwright’s Road both played with that tension. Here it felt different. We ate pie, chips and mushy peas while the room buzzed around us, but what made it convincing was the people. The staff were warm, relaxed and welcoming, and within minutes the place had the easy feel of somewhere you might actually stay for another drink. The evening had already begun.
Photo by Rebecca Murray
From the outside the building feels modern, all atriums and polished concrete, but follow the signs to the cockpit entrances and something shifts. Climbing the steps into the auditorium feels like stepping into a football stadium for the first time. The space is compact rather than grand, but the effect is striking. We were almost on the stage.
At the centre sits a circular playing area occupied only by a bar. Pumps draped in towels, stools stacked upside down, waiting to open. Two carpeted runways lead into the circle, creating a tight arena where emotional combat unfolds just inches from the audience.
Cartwright’s Two is performed by just two actors who play a carousel of characters. The landlord and landlady anchor the night as a series of couples drift through their pub, some comic, some uneasy, one ghostly. Michael Starke and Sarah White are superb. They shift between characters almost mid-breath, sometimes offstage, sometimes in full view, creating a gallery of relationships circling around what it means to be together.
Cartwright’s language still bites decades after it was written. Much of the communication comes through insult, affection disguised as attack, hostility masquerading as banter. The pub becomes a cockpit in every sense, a ring where love, frustration and brutal cruelty collide.
Silence becomes crucial. For all the insults and verbal sparring, it is the quiet moments that land hardest: the bully and his terrified wife, the uneasy spaces between couples carrying terror, confusion, love and loss. One elderly widower, played by Starke with remarkable gentleness, speaks of his lost wife with pauses that hold more weight than words. In a theatre this intimate those silent echoes are intense and feel shared rather than observed, the audience collectively holding its breath.
For two actors, a bar and a handful of props, the emotional range is astonishing. Anger, tenderness, cruelty and longing flash past in rapid succession.
One night, one pub, and a reminder that, beneath everyday exchanges, deeper battles are always being fought.
Main image by Alex Hurst
Two is at Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot until March 22, 2026. For more information, follow this link: https://shakespearenorthplayhouse.co.uk/event/two/
