First Love

Conor Lovett is arresting in the role of a homeless man who meets a prostitute and, despite his best efforts, can’t help but get an erection. Forced out of the family home and dissociating himself from his own body, this relationship seems to offer a way back to life and sanity.

Perhaps appropriately, the former Father Ted actor delivers his halting, digressive monologue like a vicar telling an anecdote, allowing desperation and madness to flash through the repression. Directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett, the production adapts one of Beckett’s early short stories. This avoids the playwright’s alienating stage direction, and allows Conor to establish a powerful connection with the audience. Addressing the audience directly with the house lights left on, one is never quite sure whether to answer his rhetorical questions. Furthermore, the frequent use of silence injects tremendous tension into the performance. Beckett’s painful comedy has rarely been so affecting.

However, the transitions between polite yammering, hesitant stammering and insane ranting are repeated too often. The lack of variation in the text makes it difficult to sustain the audience’s attention, not helped by sound bleeding through from the Pleasance courtyard. The more heavily mannered beginning and end would stand stronger if the middle were slightly abridged.

That said, anyone at all familiar with Beckett will expect such difficulties, and they are easy to overlook even for those who are not. Both Lovetts deserve praise for telling this despairing, godless parable in such an accessible, poignant manner.