Beginners
A quick note before I dive in: By the time I publish my next post, this site will have a different name. This domain was created in the hasty panic that usually accompanies graduating with a theatre degree in the midst of a pandemic. And it evokes nothing for me. As of 17 May 2024, this will now be apart-together.com.
*Spoilers Ahead… for any of you die-hard Tim Crouch fans.*
We begin inside a room— a creaky, old, potentially-haunted room. It’s one room with four beds. Is it an open space, or is it four rooms, with an interesting staging device in store for us? The layout takes me back to summers at sleep away camp. “Hello, old place,” Lucy says, as she enters with her baby and stroller in tow. And she validates my earlier suspicions when the first guest, Bart, arrives. “You know, they say this place is haunted,” she mock whispers. And indeed, there are such strange goings-on that I start to believe this may be the sticking point for the entire play: Sandy, who is “not supposed to be here,” appears as a pre-teenage child. She lingers in the back corner (her “station,” I’ll call it), only occasionally butting in on the action among Lucy, Bart, Nigel, and Joy. And she decides when the scenes change. Who is Sandy? Where is this place? Why are these four here? And why are they separated from the other adults they mention?
Without having read Crouch’s playtext prior to this production from Hedgerow Theatre Company, livestreamed by the Society of Live Streamed Theatre (SOLST), I begin to think these quirks- Sandy’s function being so unclear, objects (a backpack, towels) falling from the sky at the characters’ requests, Joy threatening the group with a toy gun as she enters, Lucy having an unrealistic baby doll that the audience fully sees is not a real baby- are directorial choices. Maybe the toy gun is a safety issue? Wow, have we really gone this far with it though? And of course, they probably couldn’t get a real baby to play Lucy’s baby? Too many health and safety concerns? And then the pieces are all put together. They’re all kids.
Kudos to the ensemble for allowing me to figure it all out for myself instead of handing it to me on a platter: Phillip Brown as Nigel could have easily hammed up his entry as a doctor. “I’m not a real doctor, you know.” He requests to listen to his “sick” patient, Lucy. After one millisecond, “All done.” Brown plays it so unadorned and matter of fact that we hardly care that the only doctor-y item he has in his old fashioned medical bag is a single stethoscope. Emma Gibson as Lucy periodically does a bit of ballet as she talks to Bart. She brushes it off quickly enough that we suspect it’s just another quirk. Joy, however, is full-throttle rage. She howls at the world like a Karen at a Target parking lot, and her passability as an adult is written into the script. Bart is perhaps the most “mature,” as mentioned by Lucy when they first met. And Mike Thurstlic brings a “dad vibe” to the role, as he leans into being foil to the other three: calm, even-tempered, polite even when correcting you about the Canary Islands. They’re not named that because they have canaries on them.
Shortly after I connect the dots myself, the reveal is made in the form of an eerie tableau. After Sandy shuts the lights off, the rain picks up, the lights slowly fade up. There’s a soft warm glow - a chiaroscuro - on the faces of our four characters… and their child doubles. A series of succinct stage pictures follow, showing the characters interacting with their child selves: a dance party, all eight of them stranded in the rain with four different coloured ponchos, and finally, a big karaoke number to Radiohead’s “Creep.” The children decide to put on a big performance for the adults before they wrap up their vacation, but they struggle to get an audience. All the adults are off at the bar. At the end, they manage to scrape up one audience member: Joy’s mum, who is dying of cancer. And after putting a few more pieces together - namely, Sandy ruining the “set” in their performance - Sandy is revealed to me to be a dog. She '“ruffs” and “scratches” and “squirrels” when she attempts to perform her lines during the performance too.
So what to make of Crouch’s work, other than the fact it’s out of the box, trusting of the audience, and expertly “showing, not telling?” Perhaps the trick is played on the audience to remind us that the gap between adult and child is not as wide as we suspected. It takes us back to the child’s mind without overtly telling us we’re being taken there. And we believe them to be adults simply because they look like adults. It suggests that children have far more to offer than we give them credit for and are all too often dismissed. Perhaps it’s a simple call to pay attention, listen, and most importantly, listen with an open mind.
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Beginners simultaneously livestreamed and performed live at Hedgerow Theatre from 3-5 May 2024. More information about Hedgerow Theatre Company can be found here.
