Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✭✩
by Kevin Elyot, directed by Joel Greenberg
Studio 180 Theatre, Panasonic Theatre, Toronto
February 15-26, 2017
John: It’s been a year or two, hasn’t it?
Guy: Nine-and-a-half, actually.
American theatre produced two landmark plays in response to the AIDS epidemic. One was Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) and the other was Tony Kushner’s two-part epic Angels in America (1991 and 1992). Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg (1994) was Britain’s response and it couldn’t be more different from Kramer’s angry political play or Kushner’s “Gay Fantasia on National Themes”.
The poster and some of the critic’s tag lines might lead a person to think the play is some sort of gay British sex farce. It isn’t. Elyot has taken the venerable British form of the drawing room comedy, perfected by gay writers like W. Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward, and used it to show how six gay men in the mid 1980s respond to the crisis. Elyot never mentions AIDS or HIV by name and as in British drama in general, especially after Pinter, Elyot communicates more in subtext than in the words characters speak. It is a play with many funny lines and wry observations, but its main mood is not comic but ironic. The Studio 180 production, the first professional production of the play in Canada, captures this mood perfectly. Director Joel Greenberg and his excellent cast know that what the characters say may be witty but they also know that the spectre of disease and death underlies everything they say.
The play’s three scenes are all set in the neat-as-a-pin sitting-room of the thirtysomething Guy (Jonathan Wilson). As a clue to the play’s nature, Scene 1 is Guy’s flat-warming party, while Scenes 2 and 3 take place after funerals. The prospect of AIDS has made Guy unwillingly celibate. One friend jokes that Guy even wears rubber gloves when he wanks. The main reason, however, for Guy’s abstinence is his unrequited love for John (Gray Powell), a dashing, independently wealthy man of the same age whom Guy knew at university. John and another university friend Daniel (Jeff Miller) used to compete in sleeping with the other’s partners, but now Daniel has happily settled down with Reg, the title character, who like Beckett’s Godot, never appears but has an influence over the lives of everyone on stage.
While the dialogue is filled with jokes, especially when the flippant Daniel is on stage, much more of the play explores relationships that are funny and tragic as the same time. We can see that Guy idolizes John, but we can see that John’s fecklessness and ease in lying make him the worst possible partner for Guy. At the same time, Guy’s obsession makes him blind to the attentions of other people as when Bennie’s housewifely partner Bernie, who is very much like Guy, hints that he and Guy should get together sometime.
While people may pigeonhole My Night with Reg as a “gay” play, its concerns are universal. Is there an essential relation between love and sex? Where do people draw the lines between acquaintanceship, friendship and love? What makes a life partnership successful? These are issues in the play just as they are in heterosexual life. The one point that is different, especially with this group of men in the 1980s, is that a one-off fling can lead to death.
The unseen Reg, who seems to have slept with everyone except Guy, is not really named Reg but Rinaldo and comes from the U.S., rather as AIDS in Britain was considered an American disease until it appeared there. “Reginald” and “Rinaldo” are both variations of the same Norse name that means “powerful ruler” and we have to wonder whether Elyot’s play has an allegorical subtext beneath its realistic surface. At first it seems a joke that the man who forced himself on Guy when Guy was on vacation was a mortician – but only at first. The play also refers to Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae (405bc) that the men performed at university. Guy had cast John as the sensuous god Dionysus, who orders the death of the spying King Pentheus, a man who tries to repress his desires.
Jonathan Wilson gives a realistic portrait of the fussy and fastidious Guy without giving in to clichés of effeminacy. Wilson adopts a tone of always caring and sharing that may drive some people up the wall, but it does make him quite distinct among the group of men. Yet, despite his constant tone of concern and reassurance, Wilson gives us glimpses of the frustrations that this tone conceals. Every time someone tells Guy how “nice” he is, Wilson winces as if he’d been stuck with a knife. Each time Guy receives a flat-warming book about “Cooking for One”, Wilson takes a breath to show Guy ’s attempt to control his despair.
The most outgoing of the group is Daniel played by Jeff Miller. Daniel is a self-appointed life-of-the-party person spouting jokes and rude remarks and trying to set-up dancing and sing-a-longs. Yet, Miller’s brilliance is in showing us that what might have been natural in his youth has become only a façade that he struggles to maintain in middle age. Daniel’s true nature comes out when he confesses to Guy that he’s afraid Reg is having an affair.
In the midst of this coterie of friends who seem to like Guy for the nostalgic connection he gives them to the past is the Eric of Alex Furber. Furber make Eric an unself-conscious youth who is still excited about the possibilities that a big city like London may afford. Yet, compared with the others, Furber shows that Eric is still charmingly quaint in his concern about the loose morals of Guy’s friends. When Guy awkwardly tries to make a pass at Eric, Eric shoots back reprovingly, “It’s like me mum asking for a snog”.
I happened to have seen the highly acclaimed 2014 revival of My Night with Reg that began at the Donmar Warehouse and transferred in 2015 to the West End. I can affirm that Studio 180’s production is both better cast and better directed. Robert Hastie, director of the Donmar production had a John who seemed to have no darker side, a Guy who was made to look too comic and an overall emphasis on the humour of the play at the expense of its more serious side. One could argue that Joel Greenberg has erred in the opposite direction by playing down the humour, yet his production is more satisfying since it highlights the self-doubts and fears of ageing and loneliness that the characters’ superficial humour tries to disguise.
Elyot specifies that the show begin with “Every Breath You Take” by The Police. Given lines like “Every move you make / Every vow you break / Every smile you fake / Every claim you stake / I’ll be watching you”, Elyot clearly saw this as an introduction to possessiveness and fear of rejection in the minds of all of the characters except Eric. Greenberg has picked up on this and made Elyot’s play one that people of any sexual persuasion can relate to. The play may be billed as a comedy, but Greenberg and his cast allow its depths to resonate.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Alex Furber and Gray Powell; Jonathan Wilson and Jeff Miller; Jonathan Wilson, Jeff Miller and Gray Powell; Alex Furber. ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.
2017-02-15
My Night with Reg