Beginning at Ambassadors Theatre: Five plays about first dates

Few words in the English language have the power to instil as much fear as ‘first date’. What should you wear? Where should you go? Will it be the best day of your life or a complete unmitigated disaster?

Theatre can be a risky choice for a date - choose something too traditional and it feels like you’re back in GCSE English, go too experimental and suddenly you’ve been plucked out of the audience and made to tell 100 people what your childhood was like.

But if you’re off a-wooing and think the play’s the thing, David Eldridge’s Beginning might just be the answer. It’s a love story for anyone disillusioned by dating apps, feeling lonely in London, and just generally wondering if they’re going to meet anyone, ever.

Eldridge’s play, described as ‘an anti romance for 21st century London’ by Fiona Mountford in her five-star review last year, has just transferred to the West End after a sell out run at the National Theatre. Justine Mitchell and Sam Troughton play Laura and Danny; they meet at a house party after everyone else has gone home, and so proceed deep and meaningfuls, the search for any remaining cans in the fridge, and Laura trying to ignore the fact Danny has a weird stain on his shirt. If nothing else about your night goes right, at least you’ll (we hope) actually be wearing clean clothes.

Beginning joins a long tradition of plays about people searching for love. Even since Shakespeare, there’s a chance a character from a play has had a more complicated or awkward first date than you. Here are a few of them.

Romeo and Juliet

They had a mare, didn’t they? Romeo and Juliet met at a masked ball, and it all went downhill from there. Let’s not forget that the reason he even clocked Miss Capulet in the first place (who was off-limits really, due to family beef), was because he was trying to get a look at Rosaline. Bet she was relieved when she saw how things turned out.

Closer

Pray that your dating life won’t be as dysfunctional as the quartet in Patrick Marber’s modern classic, which was made into a film starring Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts in 2004. A deliciously retro highlight is a first date set up on an internet chat room - by a man pretending to be a woman named Anna (the sort of thing Mizz magazine's problem pages relentlessly warned you about).

When Anna actually happens to be at the planned venue (London Aquarium - a great shout), things become even more complicated.

The End of Hope

David Ireland’s hilarious two-hander showed us what happened the day after the first date. The characters have already pretty much filed it away as a one night stand to forget, thanks to the fact Janet was wearing a giant mouse costume throughout the occasion. (Although such an image might be difficult to wipe from your memory.) But even slightly lame Tinder dates where you pointlessly argue about your polarised political opinions have the potential to shake you to your core, as Ireland suggests here. And that’s after Janet has already tricked Dermot into thinking she killed her ex-husband with an aubergine.

The Effect

A clinical drug trial may not seem like the most romantic setting for falling in love, but when has love ever played by the rules? In Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, it was hard to even tell if trial participants Connie and Tristan really had fallen madly in love, or if it was just a placebo effect of the meds they were testing. People will tell you not to overthink the early stages of dating, but when your love story coincides with neuroscience research it’s quite hard not to.

Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle

Simon Stephens’ recent new play starred Anne-Marie Duff and Kenneth Cranham as an unlikely couple who happen to meet in a park. There was an air of Lost in Translation about the pairing, who go for a date at a ramen restaurant - a worryingly messy option, splash-back potential far too high - where Cranham’s character impresses Duff’s with a voracious love of all genres of music.

Beginning is at the Ambassadors Theatre until March 24; buy tickets with GO London