The lonely hearts that light up the stage
Superb dialogue and great chemistry make David Eldridge’s romcom heartrending, says Jasper Rees
‘I think she just falls in love with him. She senses in an animal way, this is a good person’
Aman and a woman face each other awkwardly across a room. A housewarming party is over, and all that’s left is the spent detritus of bottles, cans and glasses. Laura (Justine Mitchell): willowy, Irish, a successful media executive, has just bought a one-bed flat in Crouch End. Danny (Sam Troughton), who was dragged to the party by a mate, is something dull in recruitment and lives with his mum and nan in Upminster. What can they possibly have to say to each other?
For both, long past the first flush of youth (he is 42, she is 38), the past casts shadows. She’s desperate to have a child. He hasn’t seen his in years. For an hour and a half of unbroken stage time, two damaged, lonely and seemingly incompatible people find the courage to fumble for a connection – to explore the remote possibility of a future together.
Now and then a hear-a-pin-drop new play comes along that resonates profoundly with audiences. Like a dart hitting a bullseye, David Eldridge’s one-act, two-hander Beginning, which ran for just over a month last autumn at the National’s Dorfman Theatre, addressed modern anxieties about yearning for a mate and a family in the world of dating apps. On a tide of dazzling reviews – for Polly Findlay’s pin-sharp direction and riveting performances from Mitchell and Troughton – this heart-rending romcom now transfers to the West End.
Beginning’s nearest precedent is Nick Payne’s play Constellations
– another two-hander about love – which exerted a similar magnetic pull in 2012. A small acorn at the Royal Court’s tiny Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Constellations ended up a mighty oak on Broadway. There is clearly something compelling about a man and a woman talking to each other on a stage without interruption. But what in particular struck a chord?
“I think everyone’s had a night like it,” says Eldridge with a modest shrug when we meet in the rehearsal room. “As soon as the curtain goes up,” adds Troughton, “you can feel everyone in the audience recognise that situation.” According to Mitchell, the play could easily end after two minutes with Danny getting his coat: “Awful things keep on happening,” she says. “But there’s just enough sugar. They’re just so open and their hearts are set due north that they just keep on going.”
So it’s a play about hope in the face of long odds. There aren’t a lot of those around, according to Findlay. “David has put his finger on something [loneliness] that is very widely experienced but not often dramatised,” she explains. According to Eldridge, there are heaps of plays by younger writers about twentysomethings enjoying appenabled hookups. “There’s nothing wrong with those plays intrinsically, “he says, “but [what] the characters want in Beginning are things we don’t see any more [on the stage].”
Purely to familiarise herself with the kind of woman she was playing, Mitchell signed up to Guardian Soulmates. “I just thought, my God, if I was a guy there are so many ostensibly lovely women to choose from.”
Both actors also drew on their own experiences. “I remember being single and if anyone cancelled on a Sunday it was just the worst thing you could do to me,” says Mitchell. For her, there is also the simple fact of not being a mother: “I am of that age [she is 44], where being a woman you have a relationship with motherhood even if you’re not one,” she says. “I’ve got tons of friends who are in exactly the same situation.” Eldridge, who has a six-year-old son, finds it irritating when people assume his plays are mere transcriptions of his own experiences. But he admits to drawing on relatively recent knowledge of dating. “I was on my own a few years ago for the first time in 15 years. I was expecting that in this world of the internet it was all going to be casual sex and weird configurations of relationship. And you realise things are the same as they always have been. People don’t want to be alone. They want to meet someone and fall in love.”
But he was also made very aware of women’s ticking biological clocks. “I was asked on a number of first dates whether I was interested in having more children. That’s within an hour of meeting someone.” After seeing his play, female friends confided to the playwright that broodiness had caused them to take drastic action. “A friend confessed drunkenly to me that she’s timed dates with guys for certain times in the month. Another picked up a guy in a bookshop on the right day. He didn’t have a clue.”
Despite the rave reviews, not everyone has been convinced by Eldridge’s romantic pairing. Someone told Troughton that they didn’t believe Danny – a rough-hewn wide boy who supports West Ham and craves fish finger sandwiches – would have studied history at Bristol University. “And I just went, ‘Well he did.’ The Danny who went to Bristol is a very different person to someone you meet at the start of the play, who has been shattered and is barely held together with Sellotape.” Does Mitchell struggle with the plausibility of Laura wanting Danny? “I never have,” she says. “I think she just falls in love with him. She senses in an animal way, this is a good person.”
Alongside Eldridge’s superb dialogue, the play’s secret weapon is its stars. Troughton and Mitchell hadn’t met when, as part of their audition, they were invited to take part in what Findlay calls “a chemistry read”. As with their characters, there was an initial incompatibility. “He was going on about how funny it was,” recalls Mitchell, “and I was [saying], ‘It’s quite sad, isn’t it?’”
Things really clicked when the actors decided to recreate the party that happens before the play starts, when Laura and Danny first catch each other’s eyes. One Friday afternoon a round robin invited National Theatre staff to after-work drinks on the set. “A huge number turned up,” says Findlay, “and all we expected them to do was have a drink, sit on the sofa and leave the cushions in a way that felt authentic. Nearly everybody took on much more of a brief. They were all playing Laura’s friends – some brought her house-warming gifts. We managed to stagger the exit. They left one by one. The room having been packed got gradually emptier. And you realised it was very clear that [the start of the play] was the first time [the characters] had managed to speak.”
As a title, Beginning alludes to its ending. It gives nothing away to say that the audience is asked to exercise its imagination about what happens next. The actors have their own views. And Eldridge? “Quite a lot of people have said, ‘You should write a trilogy.’ I’m never going to do that. The play ends on an amazing moment of possibility.”