The minimum requirements for any piece of theatre are an actor, an audience and a story. In Rum and Vodka, a remount of Cart/Horse Theatre’s successful 2008 Toronto Fringe piece, you only get these, though they feel anything but minimal.

Essentially a one-hour monologue detailing how drink and debauchery drop a 25-year-old male Dubliner’s life in the shitter, Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s 1995 work is quick, caustic and yet at the same time casual, never becoming moralizing or preachy. The lesson to be learned, if there is one, is that booze and booty are only as dangerous and/or delightful as one allows them to be.  

With the entire production including only static lighting, a chair and a slowly draining pint of beer, director Shaun McComb has his work cut out for him. The back room of the Cameron House is anything but hospitable to the intimate, highly personal work Rum and Vodka is.  Indeed, Matthew Gorman as the young Irish imbiber has to compete constantly with the host of various noises arising from the Cameron House’s bar — a strange but somewhat appropriate staging ground considering the performance’s narrative.

This, however, is not Gorman’s only accomplishment. His manifestation of the alcohol addict is so accessible and almost ashamedly self-effacing that one can be just about positive he drew on drunken misadventures as source material. With details of his ever more dehumanizing slide away from his job, wife and two daughters — all fueled by lust, beer, the titular rum and vodka — the play verges on the confessional, and Gorman’s true talent lies in keeping this sinful sharing simple yet specific. His accent too is decent, hitting phrases like “I need to get pissed” with a near-perfect Irish intonation.

The only real issue souring Rum and Vodka is its ending, which, while not offering a happy conclusion to a wanton weekend full of pleasure-seeking and pain-causing, cuts so fast that the final cowardly conclusion seems insufficient.     

Alcoholism is a difficult issue, not just for the Irish, and Rum and Vodka’s open and honest approach offers an understanding perhaps rare in our society, where clinical causes are often privileged over cultural ones. A free bar drink ticket with admission on Wednesdays or Thursdays is added impetus for a show that must be seen — if for no other reason than to prove that good theatre is not a function of how much money is thrown at it.