TWO actors are spending all day in the pub in York at the moment.

The pub in question is the setting for Jim Cartwright's Two, the two-hander with 14 roles between them for Eamonn Fleming and Gilly Tompkins.

The Bolton playwright piles up a series of vignettes like a stack of beer mats as he depicts the humour and the misery of everyday northern life. No time for a restful pint, then, for Eamonn and Gilly, but both are delighted to be starring in Nick Lane's Studio production.

"I first read Two five years ago when I was between jobs and a friend said, Let's do a reading', cup of tea by your side, in the front room," says Eamonn.

"I really liked the piece: it has this strange mix of being very real but also very poetic and heightened in its language, sometimes all in the same scene and it's a real quickie, 30 minutes one half, 35 the next, so he gets to the heart of each character."

"It's fun for us to do because normally you play only one character but here you have seven, so it keeps you on your toes," says Gilly.

There is not a little irony in her comment, because in her previous two appearances at the Theatre Royal, she played a maid in Hay Fever and A Cloud In Trousers. "I know, can you believe it, I'm on the York stage and I'm not playing a maid, though I have to say the only maids I've ever played have been in York!"

Fleming and Tompkins play the bickering landlord and landlady and all manner of pub characters, happy, sad, private and most public.

"It's as if Jim Cartwright has gone out of his way to put every kind of person in one boozer, but then we've all been to those places, haven't we," says Eamonn.

"A public house is what it says it is, a public house, and it's one of the few communal spaces left, even more so in these days of mass branding. It's still a place where you can drink heavily and try to get off with girls things you can't do in a library."

Two, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, tonight until June 17. Box office: 01904 623568.