Keith Huff’s new play on Broadway has two characters: Joey, a Chicago cop, and Denny, his partner. In the stage directions, Huff writes: “Joey and Denny speak directly to the audience and tell their story... Joey and Denny also occasionally address one another, in which instance a formal scene occurs.”

Hugh Jackman (left) and Daniel Craig

Technically, this approach is difficult. Denny (Hugh Jackman) and Joey (Daniel Craig) are in essence narrating the events of a soggy Chicago summer novelistically as they enact their perspectives in real time and, occasionally, interact. How can they convince an audience to care about their messy personal and professional affairs when they step outside the gritty realities as soon as a sequence develops some steam?

Hampered by this structure, neither Joey nor Denny evoke much sympathy. At each brutal revelation – Denny’s house is vandalised, both men struggle with drugs or booze, a bloody accident befalls one of the men’s sons – I registered an ever-decreasing response.

Huff’s tough, evocative writing is more muscular than anything on telly this side of The Wire. Denny’s description of street pimps, delivered with full relish by Jackman, starts with a joke and ends with: “Pimps got this smell about ’em. I call it moral rot. You can actually smell the putrid way they think wafting off-a them like rotten flesh.”

Why do non-American actors ache so incurably to play scenes straight out of early De Niro – in this case, Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, patrolling the streets with disgust for the human scum, yet with an unshakeable attraction to it? In A Steady Rain, the setting may be this-decade Chicago (the play had a successful pre-Broadway run there with a different cast), but the urban scenery – masterfully invoked by designer Scott Pask, whose tenement backdrops conjure cathedrals of decay – could be 1970s New York.

Directed impeccably by John Crowley, matinee idol Jackman conveys a street-hardened profane copper’s swagger. But it is Craig, with a moustache suggesting both Victorian grenadier and 1970s porn star, who is the more touching excavator of pain. Both performers use working-class Chicago accents that sometimes feel more like those of the football-mad figures in Saturday Night Live’s “Da Bears” skit than anything authentic. But you get used to ’em.

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