My Night With Reg
Kevin Elyot
Directed by Dan Usztan
Tower Theatre, Stoke Newington
Star rating: 4
Now almost a classic, Kevin Elyot’s thirty-two-year-old play has certainly stood the test of time. On a technical level it works partly because it’s a perfectly constructed triptych. It’s clever too because the titular Reg belongs, like Godot, with a small group of other dramatic contrivances who never actually appear. It’s also often wryly funny. In this production all six cast members bring naturalistic conviction to these anguished men as their friends and lovers die of Aids during that dreadful 1980s period when there was no medication.
Daryl Hurst, as Guy whose flat provides the setting three times over several years, is intense and anxious. Joe Lewis delights as the (younger) Eric who first appears as a painter and decorator and gradually becomes part of the group – Welsh, lithe and frank. And John Stivey’s performance as the dim, vulnerable, garrulous Bernie is very enjoyable. Nick Edwards develops John from an awkward but outwardly urbane John to the point when he reveals his troubled soul in Act 3 and I liked Billy Knowles’s take on the irritable Benny.
Really outstanding (literally because he’s a head taller than everyone else on stage) however is Richard Patient as Daniel. He plays the first act as a ridiculously camp man, never serious, throwing out rapier-sharp bitchy remarks and posturing for Britain. Then in Act 2, after Reg’s funeral, he is sober, unhappy and talking normally because he’s utterly bereft at the death of his long-term partner who, it gradually turns out, has also slept with almost everyone else in the room. In Act 3 we see a bit of the old Daniel but years have passed and he’s much less frothy than he once was. It’s a finely nuanced performance – and, like all the acting in this show, a credit to Dan Usztan’s intelligent direction.
Jude Chalk’s set gives us a very naturalistic 1980s sitting room with conservatory at the back and what fun Lucy Moss must have had designing the costumes for an era when most men wore collars and ties most of the time – when they weren’t in silk dressing gowns,
