We never learn the man’s name. But there he is, standing on the stage before us, buttoned up in a tight- fitting suit. His hands fidget, and he seems ill at ease in the presence of other people.
He’s been to see his father’s grave. “I lunched lightly in the graveyard,” he tells us. But he hasn’t gone to pay his respects: there is little love lost, especially since he learnt the terms of his father’s will. The son was left a little money, and the room in which he lived in his father’s house — not the whole house, just the room. No, he’s gone to check the birth and death dates on his father’s headstone, so that he can work out the date of his own marriage: “I must have been about 25 at the time,” he decides.
Ah yes, his marriage. Evicted from his father’s house, he ends up sleeping in a park. There a woman joins him, uninvited. This is most unsatisfactory — the woman even causes him to get an erection, which is highly inconvenient. But they end up married, although sleeping in different bedrooms. She waits on the man hand and foot (as did the man’s father before her). But she is also a much-visited prostitute, which means a lot of noise. Then she gets pregnant: “What finished me was the birth,” says the man. “It woke me up”.
This unnamed man is the subject of Samuel Beckett’s play First Love, presented at the Playhouse by Gare St Lazare Players Ireland, with Conor Lovett (above) portraying a character who is totally self-centred. He is desperately lonely, but the fact remains that he is only interested in you as someone to listen to his views and grievances. Yet somehow Beckett and Lovett between them make you like him, and his rarely exhibited flashes of chilly humour. And that, surely, is an example of theatrical magic.
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