2 Pianos 4 Hands

2 Pianos 4 Hands puts two performers at two grand pianos and follows them from first lessons to the moment each of them works out he is not going to be a concert pianist. They play every part between them: the parents, the teachers, the examiners, and themselves at eight, at fourteen and at twenty-two.

The material is the ordinary machinery of a musical education - scales, graded exams, competitions, a teacher who is kind and a teacher who is not, a father who paid for the lessons and expects a return on them. The comedy comes from precision: anyone who ever practised an instrument recognises every beat of it. The last stretch is about the specific grief of being good, but not good enough.

Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt wrote it and first performed it themselves in 1996. It has been staged more or less continuously since, always with two actors who can genuinely play, and that constraint is what makes it work - the music is performed live, at the level the story claims for it, and the playing has to be real for the ending to land.

It is very funny for most of its length and quietly brutal at the end. With only two performers, the pianos do a great deal of the characterisation, and the repertoire is used as dialogue: a phrase played badly, then better, then beautifully, is an entire childhood compressed into a few bars.

It is for anyone who took lessons and stopped, for the parents who paid for them, and for people who simply like hearing two pianos played well. Live, the music is the argument, and it only works with the instruments in the room.