Begin the Beguine

‘If the dark is nothing but the absence of light, love is at least a crack of the door.’ 

An apartment at the end of a coastal road, with a view of the sea despite the boarded windows. Two men – both imprisoned in one way or another, in their friendship and in their lives – have just moved in. They want to live it up one last time and order women from their dark bedroom. They wait and philosophize. One is out for sex, the other is looking for ever-ungraspable love.

Begin the Beguine is the last text that the legendary filmmaker John Cassavetes (A Woman Under the Influence, Faces, Husbands) ever wrote. The jet-black allegory about love and death – named after Cole Porter’s song of the same name – was kept in a cupboard for 25 years by Cassavetes’ heirs. Until the German publisher S. Fischer Verlag asked Jan Lauwers to take on the staging of the masterpiece. He created the first version in 2014 in Vienna. This is the second: actors Gonzalo Cunill and Juan Navarro collide with Romy Louise Lauwers and Inge Van Bruystegem.