My Night With Reg (NHB Modern Plays)

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Even if the chat is less philosophical than in Rohmer's movie, Elyot's characters reveal a similar capacity for deception and self-deception. No relationship, it turns out, has been safe from the randy Reg. But Elyot's great gift is for depicting, in a way applicable to people of all sexual persuasions, the wounds and hurts of love. One scene, where the tongue-tied Guy fails to declare his passion for John, echoes a similar passage in The Cherry Orchard. And the play's most tragic figure is John, a once-golden youth, who drifts through life in a cloud of irresponsibility. Set in Guy’s London flat, old friends and new gather to party through the night. This is the summer of 1985 and, for Guy and his circle, the world is about to change forever, thanks to the mounting AIDS crisis. A storm is brewing, and it threatens to spoil Guy’s plans to gather outside. This foul weather lingers, an oncoming storm, a note of pathetic fallacy for what is to come. It forces the group indoors, into close proximity, and the set never deviates from Guy’s living room, creating a sense of claustrophobia. Something dark and inevitable is coming,

All three scenes are set in the sitting room of Guy's London apartment: during Guy's flatwarming party (Scene 1); after Reg's funeral, some years later (Scene 2); and after Guy's funeral (Scene 3). Given that theatre is not exactly an art form synonymous with staunch heterosexuality, it’s surprising how few shows about LGBT lives make it into the West End. But Kevin Elyot’s poignant comedy ‘My Night with Reg’ is deservedly doing so for the second time. Robert Hastie’s pitch-perfect 20-year-anniversary revival for the Donmar has bagged itself a transfer, as did the original Royal Court production. Two hours after I’d spoken to Lewis Reeves during a break in technical rehearsals for My Night With Reg, controversy breaks. His bare bottom has been deemed unsuitable by TfL and banned from the underground. It made me realise how important the play was. I met Kevin just the once in the audition room and he terrified me! I was very scared of him. He hardly said anything.And it scales up very nicely indeed. Although there is much that is delicate and sad in this ’80s-set story about a group of gay friends heading towards middle age under the shadow of Aids, it’s also robustly funny, a springboard for some really meaty comic performances. Oh yes, totally. I have a few friends who are gay and went through that time period, so I spoke to them and asked them about their experiences. I had to be quite delicate because it was such a harsh time, there was terrifying disease and no one really knew about it. [It] completely took out friendship groups, so I knew I had to be quite sensitive when asking people about it. A heartfelt soul’ … playwright and screenwriter Kevin Elyot, who died last June. Photograph: public domain Rod Natkiel has successfully embarked on this challenge, as his production of My Night with Reg takes centre stage at the Crescent Theatre in Birmingham. The glass is also an ode to the continual drinking and chain-smoking from the cast, particularly from John and Benny; a painful reminder that impulsive, Dionysian indulgence kills. Even the reserved, nicotine-free and painfully boring Bernie faces repercussions for his indulgences.

I also can’t help wondering if he would have infused the play with more hope. Guy is the most self-loving and self-respecting of his characters but he’s sexually shunned by the others, including the man he’s secretly in love with, and isn’t rewarded with any kind of happiness by the narrative. In fact, there isn’t much redemption for any of the characters at the end of the play. Bearing in mind that since it was first performed the position of gay men in British society has improved immeasurably, I worry that this might now seem unnecessarily bleak. Geoffrey Streatfeild brings camp-free flamboyance to Daniel, the life and soul of the party whose world implodes, while Downton Abbey’s Julian Ovenden exposes the frailty and longing at the heart of easy-life-living John.

Dogfight – book by Peter Duchan, music and lyrics by Ben J Pasek and Justin Paul – is another UK premiere of another contemporary American musical, produced by dynamo Danielle Tarento, who had such a hit with the UK premiere of another contemporary musical, Titanic, in the same space last year. The words HIV/AIDS are never mentioned in My Night With Reg. But the deadly immunodeficiency virus that scythed through gay communities in the 1980s is the spectre that overshadows the action in this seminal drama. Matthew Ryan’s intimate production is staged in the Turbine Theatre under a railway arch at Battersea Power Station, and the rumbling of trains overhead for once seems to suit the action, accentuating the ominous sense of dread that builds towards the quietly devastating final scene. My Night With Reg traces the story, from the summer of 1985, of six gay men in London as their world begins to unravel because of the AIDS epidemic. Three of the characters were at university together twelve years previously and those characters and their memories are strongly based on people and life at Bristol university in Kevin Elyot’s and Rod Natkiel’s time there as Drama students. It takes on a very serious subject but it’s also incredibly funny. How do you tread that line between tragedy and comedy? He went on to write some wonderful plays. Mouth to Mouth, which he did at the Royal Court, had that same theme of yearning. Forty Winks starred Carey Mulligan in 2004. He is remembered for My Night With Reg mostly because it was his breakthrough play. It was such a surprise to everybody – this relatively unknown playwright bursting on to the scene.

Casting its painfully accurate spotlight on the fragility and unpredictability of life, it is of course devastating for all the reasons you would expect, but it’s also devastatingly heart-warming and absolutely face achingly, wonderfully, devastatingly funny. You won’t find a more life-affirming way to spend two hours in London. This is truly British drama at its very sparkly best. Who’s in it? In The Lion, Benjamin performs 15 songs on six guitars to tell a 30-year story in 70 minutes. It’s his story, about his troubled relationship with his late father, who gave him his love for music, in the form of a cookie-tin banjo. What a remarkable testament to family and fortitude, with heart-achingly beautiful music and guitar-playing fireworks. And the St James’ downstairs cabaret space is the perfect venue for it. An absolute must-see! My Night With Reg was premiered at The Royal Court in London in 1994, transferring to the West End where it won accolades including Olivier and Evening Standard awards for best comedy.

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There are things that happen in the dark between a man and a woman that sort of make everything else seem unimportant.

Meatiest of them all is Julian Ovenden as John, the charismatic enigma of the group, a hyperconfident and fantastically wealthy former rugby player who appears to lives his life unattached and carefree. Ovenden's suave, energetic performance is the engine of the production. But its beating heart is Jonathan Broadbent as John’s old uni chum Guy. Fastidious, nerdy, shit-scared of Aids and a great cook, he’s been in love with John for 20 years, dying inside a little every time his friend shags somebody else. Which he does, a lot. When the director Roger Michell asked me if I’d like to come and replace John Sessions as Reg, I hadn’t seen the play yet. We had a jokey rivalry, and I was loyal to Beautiful Thing. But when I saw John Sessions in the role, I was utterly bewitched. I don’t think I’d ever been in an auditorium where the laughter was so uproarious and the aching, painful silences were so intense. In many respects, My Night With Reg is the perfect West End play: audiences will either be hysterically laughing or crying. It is a really fun evening out, and then you come home feeling deeply touched. And you can’t ask for much more than that. Hugh BonnevilleOnly in the stage craft sense of it, of being aware of where the audience is and inviting them into Guy’s little flat. The story should be as funny and moving and intimate as it was in the Donmar space. The last time I saw My Night With Reg on stage there was no interval. This production does include one but I felt it could have been more evenly divided up. Whilst I appreciate the naked male body, the nudity in this play is irrelevant to the story and unnecessary – it would be great if there were a purpose to it. A veritable who’s who of British acting talent. Forthcoming Closer co-stars Rufus Sewell, Rachel Redford and Oliver Chris were taking a night off rehearsals alongside comedy favourites Miranda Hart and Sarah Hadland, stage regulars Clive Rowe and Nina Sosanya, former Corrie star Charlie Condou and Wolf Hall’s Jessica Raine. In a nutshell? It’s perhaps because there’d been so few plays representing gay life before My Night with Reg that it was widely regarded as a “gay play” when it first opened. Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Band had caused a stir off-Broadway in 1968, Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing had been a huge success in London in 1993 and there had also been two stridently political plays about the Aids crisis: Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. What was interesting about My Night With Reg was that it, too, dealt with Aids but, other than making the point that the disease strikes indiscriminately, it wasn’t political in the slightest; it was, and still is, a very human drama. In a sense, the play was about its time, but the themes of yearning and lost love are universal and still resonate. Though it is set in the 80s, I don’t think it’s a play only of the 80s – it speaks to us directly and vividly now.