An awkward flirtation, a 4am meltdown, and a final kiss: David Eldridge on a decade of writing about love | stage

IIt’s October 2017, and I’m sitting in the National Theater, my notebook open and my pen at the ready, waiting for the third preview of my play Beginning to begin. The first previews were done and I felt relaxed, enjoying the pre-show music and house party atmosphere. But instead of the play’s two characters, Laura and Danny, awkwardly flirting in her north London flat, I found myself imagining a couple ten years older than them, in a big house in Essex. The relationship is at the breaking point. middle. Damn, I thought, pushing the thought away as the show started.

Eight years on, the final play in my trilogy, End, is still in rehearsal at the National Theatre, in which Saskia Reeves and Clive Owen play a couple knocking sixty. The three plays are not narratively linked because I wanted the audience to be able to experience them as individual works. The beginning tells the story of a couple on the verge of forty who have just met and the 100 minutes it takes for them to kiss. The Middle is the story of a couple in their late forties whose marriage is on the rocks at four in the morning. In the end, Alfie and Julie must decide how to live through the end of their relationship. You don’t have to have seen the beginning or the middle to appreciate or enjoy the ending, but the collection of plays form a well-rounded package and explore my interests from different perspectives.

The plays deal with relationships and the different types of loneliness that exist within and outside of them. They share worlds in North London and Essex. They are all individual plays that exist in real time. At all three there is music and dancing, and some food, drink and arranging. All the guys support West Ham United. There is a sense of progress. The start starts at around 2am and by the time the finish is around 8.20am. The plays are set in late 2015 and the first half of 2016, in what seems like a more innocent time, with the London Olympics now a recent memory. In all three plays, six lives stand on the brink of tremendous change. And so does the world.

At first, after my epiphany, I was hesitant to write Medal, even though I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The problem at that point was that I had no idea what the “ending” would be, and I didn’t want to start writing a second play until I had an idea for a third. I knew Middle would view the relationship in crisis, so I didn’t want to write a “divorce play” with End. I didn’t want to write a “deathbed” play either. After a while, you realize that the way you live your end as a couple may be a choice. It may be something the characters don’t agree on.

In the beginning and middle, the characters live what I would describe as ordinary lives, but I realize they don’t have to in the end. Like me, the characters could come from working-class backgrounds in Essex but now live in North London. They can have a career as an artist, writer and DJ. In the play, Alfie taunts his partner Julie, saying, “It’s been a long time since we’ve been normal people,” to which she replies, “Where you come from never leaves you.” After nearly two years of thinking, by August 2019, I realized I had two more plays.

One of the main pleasures in presenting these plays is the way the audience seems to take them to heart. I lost count of the number of punters who asked me if Laura and Danny would stay together and have a baby after the end of The Beginning. One couple who saw the play on their first date got engaged and sent me a photo of their wedding ring engraved with “The Beginning.” A few years later, someone emailed me the news of their divorce. It made me feel unbearably sad. As if you were personally responsible in some way. Claire Rushbrook and Daniel Ryan, who played Middle, often struggled to get past the stage door after a show to audience members who shared tales of relief that their marriage had lasted — or ended.

“Relatability” is a word often used in relation to plays, but it is not something I consciously strive for. I try to tell the truth about people, and I think of John Osborne’s idea, that he wanted to give the audience ‘lessons in feeling’. In early 2023, I made Manchester Beginning for the Royal Exchange Theatre. Although I know the city well, I was initially worried that North London’s Crouch End would become West Didsbury’s club, and Manchester United would become Danny’s club. But the audience relates to the universal feelings of insecurity and attraction we all experience when we meet someone we like, not the name of a street or a football team. I suppose this might also explain why plays travel and find homes in places as diverse as Reykjavik, Santiago and Shanghai.

I wrote the first draft of Getting Started in November 2015, and it’s been a decade since I’ve been thinking about love and what it means to be with someone. People ask me if my views on relationships have changed over the past 10 years. I think they have. I think in my early 40s I was driven by ideas of romantic love and desire and the idea that “if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.” But nothing in life is inevitable, and the characters in these plays all make decisions to be brave, risk their hearts, and change the direction of their lives. They have the wisdom to create the space that might allow them to feel differently. Imagining pants on someone is still important. But love is about deciding to give love a chance too. At 52 years old, I think I stand with my characters.

We’ll have to see how it goes, but I think it’s a truth, to quote Benjamin Franklin, that in this world nothing is certain, except taxes and death. We live our whole lives knowing that one day we will leave and that the one who loves us the most will lose us. As I was writing The End, I came across the work of Crouch End poet Carol Satyamurti, who died in 2019. In her stunning posthumous book Memento Mori, she reflects, “…the trick is to resist the anticipation / of the time when November storms will strip / the trees of solace, and turn / our view of the earth to where brown / the leaves engrave death in every dusk; / but Celebrate red, blue and yellow. Black people. It’s how we live that matters. Right to the end.