‘It is with the heart that one loves, is it not?’ Director Kenza Jernite and actor Chris Born tackle the absurdist tragicomedy First Love, a play that has often been described as a “masterpiece of Beckettian perversity.”

The stage adaptation of Beckett’s novella is a one-man play that tells a story of the homeless narrator’s relationship with his first love, a prostitute whom he met on a park bench. In a story about his lover, the narrator only mentions Lulu, the prostitute, twenty minutes into the play; such is the play’s saturation with complex, profound, and sometimes nonsensical, wonderings.

The staging of this play almost benefits from the unconventional space in which it is performed. The performance space contains only three items: a leather arm chair, from which the narrator first begins his abstract wonderings; a wooden table (that later becomes a deserted cattle shed in which the man takes refuge from his lover); and of course, a park bench. The sparse staging ensures that Born’s narrator is never anything less that the centre of attention; the narrator tells us, anyway, that ‘such density of furniture destroys imagination.’

In Ralph Fiennes’ famous take on this one-man play, he mentioned that ‘there’s no dancing.’ In this intense play, Born does allow his character to dance a little; his musings over ‘anxiety constipation’ and his claim that ‘women can spot a rigid phallus from ten miles off’ are executed with a comic timing that puts the audience right in the palm of Born’s hands. The more serious wonderings do not appear to have the same finesse, however, and the accent which Born seems to don at the beginning of the play has definitely faded away by the thirty minute mark. Fortunately this does not detract from the demanding performance that Born gives; even the sniff at the beginning of the play has something captivating about it.

The play’s general running time is fifty-five minutes. Perhaps one thing this performance would have benefitted from is to have kept closer to this time, rather than dragging out it for another twenty minutes. It is a credit to director and actor that they could pull off a one-man Beckett play and maintain it for this time, yet a play this powerful and weighty would be just as compelling – perhaps more so – if it were slightly shorter. Having said that, it is definitely not a waste of an hour and fifteen minutes; Jernite and Born bring the ‘dis-peopled kingdom’ to life as Beckett’s play tells us about the connections between parsnips and violets, and shows us that ‘humans are truly strange.’ Simultaneously enlightening and mystifying, First Lovedoesn’t disappoint. Oh, and the proceeds go to charity (Education Partnerships Africa).