In an imaginative, confident piece of programming, Birmingham Rep is giving audiences an opportunity to see a vastly entertaining production (by Angus Jackson) of one of the best new plays of the past decade: Kevin Elyot's tender gay farce My Night with Reg. But were Birmingham's audiences taking it? Were they heck. At least, the punters were in very short supply at Thursday's matinee performance.
Artistic director Jonathan Church isn't bringing just new plays to the Rep: he has also brought a new sense of purpose to the theatre. For this season he has introduced a thrust stage - a brilliant move that means that if you are sitting at the back of the auditorium, it no longer feels as if you are in an entirely different county from the stage. It works especially well here, because Elyot's tale of a group of gay men unknowingly bound together by the never-seen Reg, who dies of Aids offstage, is an intimate affair.
As affecting as it is funny, it charts a few years in the life of Guy, an emotionally timid nice guy. His social gatherings provide a meeting place for a group of gay men who have known each other since university and have often been sexually intimate, but seldom emotionally revealing or giving. This is a play that makes you ache with laughter and loneliness and loss.
Jackson's production is very good on the comedy, but seems slightly constipated on the drama's more Chekhovian emotional nuances. Although all the cast give excellent performances, the overall effect is rather less than the sum of its parts. There is full-frontal nudity (maybe the reason for the sparse matinee audience) but not quite the full-frontal emotional assault that the play requires for the delicate balance between tragedy and comedy.
But this is still a big, brave, compassionate and immensely enjoyable 100 minutes in the theatre, that has an appeal way beyond a gay audience. We can no longer take our regional theatres for granted. You use it or you lose it.
· Until October 12. Box office: 0121-236 4455.
