IF FINDING LOVE and keeping it was an easy business, there would be far less stories about its intrigues and misfires, the games that people play with it and the bruisings they get in its wake. ‘n Begin is a beautifully directed and well-performed play, which tosses the certainty of love up in the air, whips it across the theatre and allows it to crash and burn on the floor, before it is pummelled into what ifs, maybes and instances of yes-they-will-no-they-won’t. It’s on at the Market Theatre until 16 February 2025.
And here, it’s a girl-fancies-boy kind of tale. The housewarming party of Laura (Cintaine Schutte) in her new flat in upmarket Sandton has come to closure. Daniel (Carel Nel) is the last guest left standing. She wouldn’t mind a little nookie to end the evening. He’s paralysed to the hilt with awkwardness. They’re both a little drunk.
But it’s more than that. He’s an acquaintance of a mutual friend. She’s been alone for some time. He’s got a cupboard full of sadness and a heart full of regrets. She’s ovulating; her fridge is empty.
It’s a call and response Beckettian-structured work which wittily and sometimes cruelly picks apart both characters to reveal their inner bits and pieces. Think of aspects of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but with just two characters to act as foils both brutal and gentle to one another.
The picture of life for both Laura and Daniel is not what either of them were raised to believe it would be. Happily ever after and never again alone are myths that both of them have realised, now as adults in their late-thirties/early forties, each with a catastrophe of ghosts on their shoulders. It’s about lost children and parents who are either too far or too near. They’ve got stories they don’t want to tell and conversational tracks that are easily diverted by the domestic needs of a post-party flat covered in spangly tinsel, with a vomited-in bedroom and bottles in various stages of emptiness all over the floor.
But it’s also a tale about conversation and how one thing does eventually lead to another. Featuring very satisfying give and take, the work is about 10 minutes too long and goes into levels of intimacy on stage which fly in the face of the bond of repartee set up in the body of the work. The final scene reduces the whole work to the crudely obvious and diminishes the sophisticated understanding of both characters, unforgivably. Translated by from British playwright David Eldridge’s 2017 play Beginning, ‘n Begin is as much about language as it is about contemporary South African nuance. Translator Nico Scheepers has taken potent ownership of this work.
A deeply watchable, intelligently written and relatable work which is livened with cultural references that embrace many things from Harry Nilsson’s 1971 hit Coconut, to The Incredibles and Peppa Pig, ‘n Begin doesn’t hold back on the vulgarity of young adults, or of their sexual candour. It is a bit of a plot-spoiler by virtue of its title. Yes, this is the beginning of something. The ping-pong sense of dialogue embraces an understanding of how we as human beings make sense of the world: timorously, sometimes crudely, and often with bravado laced with fear, in spite of all we are endowed with, by way of social media discourse, self-knowledge and independence.
- ‘n Begin is written by David Eldridge and translated into Afrikaans by Nico Scheepers. Directed by Tinarie van Wyk-Loots, it is performed by Carel Nel and Cintaine Schutte at the Upstairs Theatre, Market Theatre complex in Newtown, Johannesburg, until 16 February 2025.