·       The Fifth Step (NT Live)

• 4/11/26 (Sat)

A National Theatre Live film of a two-man stage show of 2025. The title refers to Alcoholic Anonymous’ 12 steps toward recovery.

A nervous young Scottish man works with his older mentor at AA to overcome his addiction to drink. They are going through the 12 steps, approaching the fifth, which demands admitting your flaws to someone as well as yourself. He claims to be incel (involuntarily celibate, i.e., can’t get laid – they need a word for this?). He is generally obsessive, claiming to masturbate dozens of times per day and fixated over women. His calmer mentor appears to have his life under control: married, children, no drink in decades. The young man expresses envy, comparing marriage memorably to “pussy on tap”. (The mentor assures him that it’s not that easy.)

The young man seeks solace in religion, but the more skeptical mentor says that you can find God anywhere if that’s what you want to believe, even in a paper cup. At one point, the young man is hallucinating that his mentor is a rabbit. As their relationship evolves, the mentor becomes more controlling. When the young man develops a relationship with a woman, the mentor warns him that he is just exchanging one fixation for another and says he must wait until he is cured before venturing into romance. The young man is understandably peeved since it was the mentor who was encouraging him to find spiritual comfort in the first place. It then emerges that the woman who the young man is sleeping with might be the mentor’s wife. The men’s relationship begins to change as we discover that the mentor has not been entirely honest with the man – or himself.