By FRANK SCHECK
Rating: 
Last updated: 8:15 am
July 24, 2008
Posted: 3:22 am
July 24, 2008
FOR the past two weeks, a master class in acting has been offered in the "Gate/Beckett" series at the Lincoln Center Festival. First came Liam Neeson's searing silent performance in "Eh Joe," followed by Barry McGovern's intensely florid solo turn in "I'll Go On."
And now there's Ralph Fiennes, investing his rendition of the playwright's 1965 short story "First Love" with a quiet precision that's all the more powerful for its restraint.
Dressed in a suit and overcoat colored only in shades of brown (as is the nearly bare stage setting), Fiennes plays the unnamed narrator of the piece, who describes his first, and only, experience with love. Except - as is made brutally clear by the end of the 55-minute monologue - he's a man wholly incapable of feeling anything.
"What goes by the name of love is banishment," he declares.
The homeless narrator, who spends most of his time on a park bench, describes meeting a vivacious woman named Lulu who, after a series of encounters, invites him to share her modest flat. Highly attracted - "a man is, at the age of 25, at the mercy of an erection," he explains - he takes her up on her offer, only to discover that she makes her living as a prostitute.
When she becomes pregnant with his child, he flees into the safety of his emotional isolation.
While "First Love" is undeniably minor Beckett, it nonetheless resonates with his elegantly profane language and mordant humor. Who else would, professing a love of graveyards, favorably compare the odor of the buried corpses with "what the living emit"?
Fiennes exploits the material for all it's worth with a brilliantly controlled performance. Michael Colgan's staging is equally effective, replete with such touches as the faint sound of a woman singing to remind both narrator and audience alike of the joy he's willingly, willfully foregone.
FIRST LOVE
