Jim Cartwright is an internationally acclaimed writer of contemporary theatre who will be performed in Malta for the first time in a Unifaun Theatre production at St James Cavalier. Two is being produced on the 21, 22, 23, 28, 29, 30 April with veteran actors Pia Zammit and Edward Mercieca playing all the roles.

We are introduced to a savagely if comically bickering landlord and landlady running a pub and serving customers. The play shifts to introduce other characters who visit the pub with interludes from the landlord or the landlady until it climaxes with a seemingly irrelevant incident.

As is the case with all Cartwright plays, Two presents stark, realistic characters in their everyday lives. The characters are portrayed with great care and sensitivity through monologues and dialogues, a technique that Cartwright is a complete master of. This play, in fact, won him Best Play Award in 1989 from the Manchester Evening News.

We meet comic characters like Moth (an aging Don Giovanni no woman wants) and Maudie, Mr and Mrs Iger (the wimp and the macho loving wife) as well as tragic characters like the landlord and the landlady.

Cartwright portrays each character, comic or nasty, with affection. In a short note he offered to actors Pia Zammit and Edward Mercieca, he insisted that they should “have fun because that’s what the work in the play is all about”.

According to Edward Mercieca, who’s already been through a similar marathon in last year’s Stones in his pocket, the greatest challenge is “shedding each character to portray the next as a different identity” whereas Pia Zammit, who is working on such a text for the first time, maintains that the biggest challenge is “to do justice to each character”.

Two is a unique, intimate play, a masterpiece of contemporary theatre. The Maltese public should not to miss this play since very few of its kind are produced on our islands.