TwoO’Connor’s, Salthill★★★☆☆Staged in the charmingly cluttered O’Connor’s pub in Galway, Two, directed by Andrew Flynn, unfolds from behind the open-plan bar, the actors addressing us familiarly as regular customers. They are the landlord and landlady, a married couple running a pub in northern England sometime in the 1980s. They hate each other passionately. “You’ll be the death of me,” he grumbles. “If only,” she replies.What follows is a succession of pub regulars, offering glimpses into the lives of the townspeople, all played by just the two actors, the brilliant Patrick Ryan and the wonderfully versatile Clelia Murphy, who can switch from abject alcoholic lust to complicated maternal grief in an instant.Jim Cartwright has structured his play as a series of compressed vignettes, each balancing bawdy tavern comedy with a truly bleak sense of just how badly ordinary life can turn out.A woman cherishes her daily escape from the husband whose damaged body she tends; another patron tries to seduce every woman in the audience while ignoring the only woman who might reciprocate his interest: his poor girlfriend. Another couple show a genuinely chilling portrait of coercion. The humour is earthy and often grotesque. Like the England of Patrick Hamilton, these are lives diminished by poverty and disappointment, made bearable only by jokes and drink.The cumulative effect is unexpectedly moving. Beneath the barroom banter lies a deep, unresolved grief that finally surfaces in the play’s closing revelation, accompanied by a haunting slow rendition of Take on Me. The script slightly overstays its welcome: a handful of the vignettes could have been trimmed, and some could be cut altogether. Even so, Two remains a painful but very funny play, carried by the excellence of its actors.Two is at O’Connor’s pub, Salthill, as part of Galway International Arts Festival, until Sunday, July 26th