Beginning, Ambassadors Theatre review ★★★★★

The desolate pasts of two lonely 30-something year olds, and their deepest desires for the future, march cheek by jowl in this punchy new two-person play by David Eldridge, which arrives in the West End after a sellout premiere at the National's Dorfman Theatre.

Beginning transports audiences to the aftermath of Crouch End flat-warming party where Laura (Justine Mitchell) and Danny (Sam Troughton) can be found swinging aimlessly to non existent music. It's late, they're drunk, fag ends and empties litter the floor, their friends have gone home and expectation hangs in the air.

These two characters seem, at first, to have nothing in common. Laura is a recently signed up member of the Labour Party, but too busy as Managing Director of her company to go door to door with fliers. She bristles with irritation each time Danny's 'roughed-up' Essex tones profess patronising attitudes towards 'a bit of skirt', or litter his sentences with sexist language. Yet she maintains that he should stay.

Time ticks by, more and more drinks are pulled out of the fridge, but the odd couple fail to make their way upstairs. Soon they discover that despite their apparent differences, they both exist in a toxic mental maze of loneliness, insecurity and English inhibition. Maybe, just maybe, if they can make it upstairs together, they'll get more than just sex from one another. Or maybe not.

In a playful inversions of rom-com tropes, writer David Eldridge taps into a reality that millennials can't fail to recognise. Instead of a bland 'cute meet' and inevitable happy ending we are presented with frictions between gentrifying liberal ideals and lad culture; the plight of ageing parents; the everyday loneliness of keeping down a stressful job; the tick-tock of the biological clock and the unlikeliness of ever being able to buy a flat in Crouch End.

The two actors bring warmth and nuance to a couple of characters who, in other hands, would be pretty unlikeable. Their sharp questions and stuttering answers inadvertently encourage us to reconsider their own lives. And we find ourselves, the rather romance-less beginning, rooting for this unlikely couple.