Two Pints started life as a social media experiment. In 2011, Roddy Doyle opened a Facebook account and he posted a few imaginary conversations in which two men comment on the news of the day. He was encouraged to turn his Facebook posts into a novella and then a play, so he developed a story structure around the death of the father of one of the men, and the result is Two Pints.
The premise is simple. Two friends, of around sixty-ish, meet in a Dublin bar where they drink considerably more than two pints of Guinness, served by a silent bartender, Raymond (Steve Gunn), and share their enthusiasms, their irritations and their griefs. It is a portrait of male friendship and a lament for the music-free pub, presented on Claire Winfield’s gorgeous, naturalistic set and entirely devoid of movement. Some of it is funny, some of it is moving and the whole narrative loops around a sense of their own mortality.
The two unnamed men—they are just called One (Anthony Brophy) and Two (Sean Kearns) in the programme—don’t like hospital car park charges but they are big fans of Nigella Lawson and The Good Wife on Netflix. They have their own theories about food—all meat is female and beans aren’t really vegetables—and they have ideas for various new reality TV formats, including Celebrity Car Park Attendants. Their human biology is a bit shaky—do women have tonsils? and where exactly is the prostate?—but their fashion advice on men in hats is spot on. They are not convinced there is an afterlife, but if there is, they want it to include a football team made up of multiple Nigella Lawsons, plus Benazir Bhutto, Christine Lagarde, Condoleezza Rice and Angela Merkel, preferably playing in a 4-3-3 formation rather than 4-4-2.
Beneath the rambling pub talk lies an acute sense of the proximity of death, their own and that of the people they love. At times, it has a Beckettian, Godot-like absurdism; at other times it’s more like an extended Pete and Dud, Two Ronnies sketch. In its own quiet way, it does something which seems almost radical now: it puts on stage white, working class men who live decent lives and who are comfortable in their own skin.
The pub is where they share their worries about their aging bodies and their declining mental capacity and they show each other kindness and love. The play also hints at a wider social issue that, with fifty pubs a month closing across England and Wales, might there be a connection between the decline in spaces for men to sit and talk and the rise in male violence?
Two Pints is one of those pieces that could be twenty minutes long or three hours. Roddy Doyle has updated the script for this 2025 production, and in this version, it runs nearly two hours, which is probably a bit longer than it needs to be. The 2017 Abbey Theatre production was performed in pubs, which would be a fun way to see it. It’s being done here in the Belgrade studio with acres of unused space between the audience and the actors. The audience is on the bartender side of the bar, so the actors sit on the other side facing us: that means we can see their faces but they can really only act from the waist up. The static format doesn’t give the Lecoq-trained director, Sara Joyce, much to do, but, in a way, the stillness and the empty space lend themselves to this existential meditation on life and death.
With Andrew Tate in the news and Adolescence on TV, Patrick Marber’s Dealer’s Choice at the Donmar Warehouse and James Graham’s Punch on its way into the West End, masculinity in general, and white, working class masculinity in particular, doesn’t get a good press these days. Two Pints is a beautifully written, and beautifully played, reminder that the word ‘masculinity’ doesn’t always have to be prefixed with ‘toxic’.