First Love is a bit of a surprise. For one thing, it’s startling that Samuel Beckett ever wrote anything with such a seemingly sentimental title. Written in 1946, before any of the plays for which Beckett would become most famous, the short story is a typically strange, cynical and blackly comic take on romance. A Beckett piece is also an unexpected choice for open-air theatre – usually the preserve of family-friendly shows and Shakespeare in the park. But something about it works.
Instead of opting for something clunkily topical, the show that opens Park Bench Theatre’s short season of socially distanced performances has light, unforced resonances with the experience of coronavirus lockdown. It begins with death – that well-trodden Beckettian territory – and isolation is a running theme. The speaker is a reclusive character, shunning most human contact, and the love of the title is an odd and awkward union with a woman who intrudes on his solitude at the canalside bench where he’s sleeping. Becoming reluctantly infatuated with this stranger, his attempts to break their unexpected bond only bring the two closer.
As the unnamed narrator, Chris Hannon does an impressive job making sense of the story’s tangled threads, weaving them into a compelling tapestry of a tale. His words, delivered through headphones to the carefully spaced-out audience members, feel incredibly intimate even as the character holds others at a distance. Hannon finds every last ounce of wit and humour in Beckett’s linguistically playful text, while director Matt Aston makes great use of the limited outdoor space. At times, the performance is almost like a duet with the park bench on and around which it’s performed – aptly, as for the speaker woman and bench are virtually indistinguishable in his memory.
There’s also something powerful about experiencing live, in-the-flesh storytelling after so many months of virtual theatre. In spite of the presence of all the necessary Covid-secure measures – from separate audience “bubbles” marked out on the grass to the one-at-a-time entry to the performance area – for an hour it’s possible to once again get lost in a piece of performance.
