This accessible black comedy handles a sensitive topic with insight, humour, and the most imaginative uses for sugar I’ve ever seen on stage.

It is easy to see why playwright Gillian Plowman’s works tend to be popular choices at drama festivals round the world.  With her strong social conscience, she chooses to focus on the problems of the homeless, the unemployed, petty criminals, the overweight, ill, blind, sexually abused, and those released from psychiatric or penitential institutions. Given any such handicap, how do you cope with life?

Me and My Friend is structured around two odd couples, recently released from psychiatric hospitals into what is optimistically described as community care. These two pairs of ex-patients inhabit depressingly sparse flats in the same building, while they strive to rebuild their lives.

In Act 1, two men put on red bowties to practise interviews for jobs we realise they will never get. In Act 2, two women prepare for an afternoon nap, and try to make plans as the hospital staff advised – but their dream trip to France will similarly never eventuate.

The connections to Beckett are clear. The conversations are often delightful, reflecting the absurdisms of the society they hope to re-enter. Their efforts to behave as ‘normal’ people do are both touching and funny.

The men’s determination to groom themselves results in hair lacquer being used as mouth freshener, while the women save coins in individual empty drink cans, which necessitates the buying of new cans to empty. 

Gradually we learn their back stories: one man, Oz, was a postman who concealed letters he couldn’t deliver; Bunny was a print manager whose obsessive workaholism cost him his marriage. Of the women, Robyn has a ghastly secret that destroyed her marriage, while Julia’s disturbed attitude to sex, probably the result of abuse, has left her fearful of any touch.

It is Oz who is bold enough to make contact, delivering a parcel to the flat upstairs, and eventually inviting the women to a party for which he will bake tarts. The scene is thus set for the third act, which will bring the four together. (And spill a lot of sugar.) Though in many ways it seems possible to set up two matches made in heaven, we sense it is bound to end in disaster. Hell is still other people.

Director Nigel Ensor has ensured a high level of commitment from his cast, though sometimes the pace seems a little swift for such confused individuals. Wyeth Chalmers as Oz, the one who seems most likely to rejoin the real world, drives the plot with energy and conviction, yet displays compassion for his more helpless room-mate. As Bunny, Steve McNamara succeeds in creating an impression of great fragility and vulnerability. Like Chalmers, he is touching in his attempts to maintain his dignity – even when discussing circumcision.

Julia is the more confident of the women, at least until she has to let her guard down in sleep, and Denise Casey gives her an appealing bossiness as well as an attractive Irish accent. Kate Lindsay, as Robyn, has a harder task to make credible the more melodramatic history of her character, but is ultimately convincing. The two, aided by clever lighting, handle the potentially awkward re-enactment of their past lives with aplomb.

The last play I saw [My First Time] seemed to imply that getting laid was the answer to all life’s questions.  A condom was even placed enticingly on each theatre seat.  In Me and My Friend, the case is far more compellingly made that it is sex that mucks it all up. In their flatmate pairings, these four misfits are offered safety and even comfort.  It is their endeavours to form sexual connections that have been, and will continue to be, their undoing. 

This Globe production gives us a welcome opportunity to explore some of the complexities of living today, as we watch their struggles from a safe distance, sometimes smug, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes appalled.

Finally, the existential angst brought on by their sudden freedom in a terrifying world is stunningly expressed in the poster design by Andy Cook: a striking reworking of Munch’s The Scream, composed of not one, but four anguished faces.
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Gillian Plowman’s Me and My Friend is undeniably a comedy, but it’s as bleak as they come. The first act begins with two men distractedly role-playing an interview for a job which we know instantly that Bunny, the applicant, hasn’t the faintest chance of getting. Former psychiatric patients, they are trying to fit themselves back into the community, but it’s hard.

In a nearby flat Julia and Robin, similarly situated, seem more closely in touch with normality, at least until we know more about them and come to understand that their dream of a trip to France is no more realistic than the men’s employment ambitions. One day Oz, who’s good at cooking, decides to throw a party.

Me and My Friend takes us into the lives of those who, while not considered ill enough to be hospitalised, cannot quite function in ways that the rest of us take for granted. It shows us, painfully but with determined humour, the strains that can lead to breakdown, and invites us to reflect on society’s treatment of and attitudes to the mentally ill.

The Globe’s production, ably directed by Nigel Ensor, won the approval of Thursday night’s small (about 20 people) but very appreciative audience.

Wyeth Chalmers is funny and confident as Oz, the ex-postman who would just love his job back, or a girlfriend, or both. Steve McNamara conveys Bunny’s tormented anxiety, Kate Lindsay is convincing as the migraine-prone Robin, whose story is the most heartbreaking of all, and Denise Casey is assertive but fragile as Julia, the one-time steel worker who cannot bear to be touched.
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