Photo by Johan Persson

Epigraphs
I’ve always been intrigued by epigraphs that are printed in the published text of a play. Audiences who see a live performance of a play are not generally privileged to know what an epigraph says, although of course the director and actors will have absorbed the epigraph into their engagement with the play. Only when you read the play text do you enjoy the additional clue to a playwright’s intent that an epigraph perhaps provides.  

There are two epigraphs that precede the text of Beginning. The first is a quotation from Joseph Conrad’s novel Under Western Eyes:

Who knows what true loneliness is – not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

This is a pretty dark thought for what on the surface at least initially appears to be some sort of rom-com about dating. In fact as we discover, both Laura and Danny suffer from desperate loneliness. Danny reveals that he has considered suicide, and when Laura confesses the extent of her loneliness by describing her life as “a shell of activity” that she daren’t look inside, she echoes Conrad’s image of the deep inner darkness that we must hide from ourselves.

The second epigraph is a cyptic snippet of dialogue from a play by Franz Xaver Kroetz, Through the Leaves (1976):

Martha: If you wasn’t here with me tonight I’d go to the pictures.
Otto: What’s on?
Martha: ‘Ben Hur.’ It’s an oldie, must be ten years since I saw it, but it’s a film you never forget. You ever seen it?
Otto: No.

David citing the work of Kroetz during our recorded conversation, as one of his inspirations to create a naturalistic play. What does the brief exchange above suggest without any additional context?  Perhaps that Martha is another lonely sole – she would be going to the movies on her own if not with Otto – and although she may be seeking some companionship from Otto, there’s a gap between their personal interests and passions, and therefore who they are. Much like Laura and Danny come up against the fact that they have different tastes in music when they fail to dance together.

Even if I may be reading too much into the interpretation of the epigraphs, they serve to start the mind thinking as you set off to experience the play.

The language of sex
During our podcast we talked about the cliched, macho language that Danny uses in the first part of the play, in which he mimics vocabulary learned from his Essex mates. He tells his friend Keith, for example, that “you’re bang in there”, referring to his chances with Laura, and further notes that Keith does “not want for skirt”. But the bolshiness of his language does not match the diffidence of his behaviour, and when he calls Laura “babe” once too often, she calls him out on it. In fact the way Danny speaks about women thereafter reveals that he has a much more nuanced and sensitive understanding of the appropriate attitudes to gendered sexual behaviour. The language that he uses about love and sex betrays its sources in some of the common paradigms of male and female sexual roles, as revealed for example with his confessing that “sometimes men like to be in the mood too” to counter the cliche that men are not always in thrall to indiscriminate desire, while referencing of course the reverse cliche that believes that women traditionally need to be in the mood. When he asks Laura if she believes in love at first sight, he may be positing the possibility that something more important may be happening in their mutual attraction than just sex. An ideal he elaborates on when he expounds that “women want to be treated as a person” rather than an object. Although he is clearly quoting the politically correct parlance of feminism, we also recognise that he has an instinctive sympathy for this attitude, as revealed by his justifying its correctness by saying “I’ve got a daughter”, a girl who will be a woman and who must be protected from chauvinism. Although his language apes generic expression, his honest attempts to define his own feelings about love and sex show us why Laura describes him as a “good man”.