Love and loneliness in hell ****

In Begin the Beguine, Jan Lauwers presents a claustrophobic tale of loneliness, disappointment and appearances. Somewhere between a rainbow and purgatory.

The American actor, director and scenarist John Cassavetes (1929-1989) wrote Begin the Beguine just before drinking himself to death. He never had the chance to direct the play himself, but hoped it would be performed in the 21st century. For twenty-five years the play lay untouched by Cassavetes’ heirs. It was a matter of waiting for the right person in the right place. All the pieces of the puzzle came together when Jan Lauwers was asked to stage the play at the Burgtheater in Vienna five years ago. Now there is a new version, with Lauwers’ own daughter Romy Louise in one of the star parts.

The setting is a remote coastal village somewhere on the periphery of Europe, ‘white and sandy, without hope’. It is the end of the line for two marginalised men who want to try to make a good time of it once more before their lives tumble into the abyss. The Spanish actors Gonzalo Cunill and Juan Navarro revel in their roles as Gito and Morris. The plan is to feast on prostitutes until the point of death, a notion reminiscent of the film La Grande Bouffe (1973) in which a group of men retreats to a house in the countryside to eat themselves to death.

This automatically implies a substantial dose of existential chaos and hysteria. They romp around the stage, naked and giggling, fired up by their rented girls. But in between the sex sessions come the emotional breakdowns, the pitch-black self-destructive musings on their failed lives. The realisation of an inner void that elicits panicky primal screams. And although Morris wants to believe in his ‘rainbow of happiness’, in the end it seems above all that the men are stuck in a maddening purgatory.

One of them wants sex, the other wants the appearance of love. At first sight it seems to be at odds with our times: the women are invariably prostitutes, exploited sex slaves who must bend to the will of the men. But ultimately it is they who keep their feet and the men who show their failure. While Gito and Morris curl up around their disillusions, the high-heeled women walk self-confidently right over them.

Begin the Beguine is dark and feverish, as flamboyant as it is dreadfully gloomy. Lauwers has staged it sparingly with the aid of just a couple of chairs and clothes racks. The rest is left to the imagination, because this play is all about imagination, appearances and the chauvinistic illusion of masculinity. The men try to imagine what the prostitutes’ love is like: “Can I pay you to like me? It doesn’t have to be real. Just pretend you like me.” But they are disappointed and make a pathetic spectacle of themselves. Lauwers takes us on a claustrophobic trip into loneliness, disappointment and the hysterical debauchery that flares up as the end approaches.