New light was cast on David Eldridge’s 2017 play Beginning by last year’s sort-of sequel, Middle. These two-handers don’t concern the same characters but, as portraits of burgeoning romance and seasoned marriage respectively, they each gain emotional resonance from the other.
Both find a couple in the small hours, weighing up relationships. Middle has spilt blood, broken crockery and affection souring into acrimony whereas Beginning is all ketchup stains, frothing lager and heady anticipation. If the second play presents an overgrown lawn of a marriage, Beginning is about tender green shoots.
Bryony Shanahan’s revival relocates the drama from London to Manchester, finding an equivalent to Crouch End in West Didsbury, where Laura has had a housewarming. Danny is the last guest to leave – which might be after one more Peroni or the next morning. She’s 38; he’s 42. Both automatically question whether they’ve met a life partner or a one-night stand.
Erin Shanagher’s confident Laura (sleek, poised, striding around in a jumpsuit) unsettles Gerard Kearns’ Danny who rounds off his ramblings with a nervous chuckle. It is screwball comedy territory that she wants to kiss while he tries to tidy up, but Eldridge’s characters have extra depth. Danny’s air of adolescent awkwardness, accentuated by the fact he’s moved back in with his mum, cues some choice one-liners yet also painfully reflects the dislocation of dating again as a divorced father.
Shanagher’s response to the revelation about Danny’s daughter is a highpoint in an evening that reinforces the adage that acting is reacting. The many silences in the script are mostly teased out to powerful effect. Both actors excel at the physical comedy – uncorking a stubborn wine bottle, say – and you’d know purely from their movements whose home it is. The swish kitchen island in TK Hay’s set helps reinforce the sense that they are trying out a lifestyle and playing house together, whether stacking the dishwasher or sharing fish-finger butties, and the effect is not just humorous but achingly melancholic when you remember Middle.
Staging the play in-the-round brings us intimately into the flat, with the front row sitting on sofas, but what’s missing is that particular wired and weary early-hours feeling. Still, Eldridge’s words are as wise as ever about ageing, family, work, mistakes, hopes, class, love, loneliness and all the stuff of life. And Shanagher and Kearns are superb as the couple who, like the pair of elegant swan-necked lampposts within Hay’s set, stand alone together.
At the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 11 March
