It begins with silence. A young man sits on his couch, scrolling on his phone, smoke curling into the dim light. This is Evan, the centre of Joe Eason’s Two Come Home, and from the first moments the audience is pulled close, the stage ending almost at their feet. The intimacy is deliberate. This is a play with music that drags us into the raw pulse of rural queer life, where poverty, violence and fleeting tenderness collide.

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The set is stripped back. A sofa. A guitar on a blanket. A lamp glowing beside a radio. Wooden slats rise behind, suggesting a house that feels both solid and broken, a place of shelter and entrapment. Samuel Button Bell’s lighting washes the stage in reds and blues, evoking danger, memory, tenderness and fracture. The images burn into you: the father’s unsettling smile under the red haze, the mother collapsed in shadow, the mirrored staging of Evan and Jim against the parents in bed.

At its centre is Evan, written, composed and performed by Eason.

“I wanted a gay guy where sexuality is not really his issue.”

Evan is not trapped by queerness but by poverty, by anger, by the weight of being ignored. When Ryan Williams enters as Jim, an old love returning, the connection between them feels lived in and believable, their tenderness a rare beauty in the violence of the story.

“We both started as angry, lonely, sad boys and ended up tired of it and just trying to be happy.”

The ensemble around them brings sharp edges. Krista Larsen’s Amy and Michael Claff’s Caleb embody the claustrophobia of family ties, while Hannelore Canessa Wright as Ashley becomes a chorus figure, delivering the play’s most direct truth.

“Happiness is a choice you know? So is misery. So choose.”

Emily Moment on vocals and Elizabeth Cleone Hopland on cello carry the music with presence, underscoring scenes with folk textures that feel engraved into the story. The songs are stitched with care, though sometimes overshadowed by dialogue, leaving you wishing for more moments when the music could breathe.

Isobel Sheard’s direction draws raw performances and places the audience in the middle of it all. At times the staging can feel too static, the action circling within a confined space. The immersive closeness is a double edged sword: powerful in its intimacy, but occasionally monotonous across two acts. Still, moments of stagecraft linger: the mirrored positions of parents and lovers, the sudden flood of light that exposes more than words ever could, the silence before the music cuts back in.

The strength of Two Come Home lies in its rough edges, where anger and tenderness sit side by side. There are jagged rhythms, but also rare flashes of truth that feel almost unbearable in their beauty. The father’s grin, the softness of Jim’s touch, the rawness of Evan’s anger are not theatrical tricks but glimpses of life unvarnished. It is theatre that aches to be felt more than judged.

As the cast take their bows, the house set glows behind them, lit red and blue, a fragile frame holding the wreckage of love and survival. The play ends as it began: intimate, close, impossible to ignore. Two Come Home is bruising, tender and unforgettable.

At times it hovers between 3.5 and 4, with some moments not pushing far enough, but the performances and the honesty of the story immerse you so deeply that it ultimately deserves the full 4.

Written by Lex Melony

Show Details: Two Come Home at The Cockpit

• Dates: Tuesday 2 September to Saturday 13 September 2025
• Times: Evenings at 19:30, selected matinees at 14:30
• Venue: The Cockpit, Gateforth Street, London NW8 8EH
• Tickets: £22.63 full price (including £1.63 fee), £19.54 concessions (including £1.54 fee)
• Tickets: The Cockpit Theatre Website