Kevin Elyot never matched the success of his early hit My Night With Reg and his final play, written shortly before his death in 2014, has had to wait until now to get its premiere. Like much of Elyot’s work, it hops around in time and explores the guilt that lurks under a well-mannered, middle-class surface. Its main virtue, however, lies in its suggestion that the decriminalisation of homosexuality, however much to be welcomed, came too late to rescue lives blighted by anxiety.
Set in a London Victorian villa, the play takes place over three summers. In the best scenes, set in the present, we see shy, lonely, middle-aged Barry having a daytime encounter with an unusually obliging estate agent and suffering an evening of desperate misery with his drunken mum, Isabella. But the play also whisks us back to 1961, when Barry’s parents are entertaining a pair of uncles who have long had to keep their lust for each other under wraps, and to 1967 when the summer of love may have liberated Barry’s mum but didn’t do much for his elderly uncles.
Elyot writes well about the dark secrets of family life and about the disjunction between legal advance and lived reality: technically, Barry may be free to indulge his taste for sadomasochistic sex but he is clearly inhibited by his instinctive reserve and his need to look after a querulous mum. The cultural references are also well planted so that in 1961 the strait-laced uncles walk out of Hitchcock’s Psycho: if only they had stayed, they might have realised it gratified their particular tastes.
But, while Elyot understands the historic pressures faced by gay men, he is much less convincing on the world of hetero freedom: I couldn’t believe a word of the young Isabella’s surrender to a handyman who is a mix of Joe Orton’s Mr Sloane and DH Lawrence’s Mellors.
Anthony Banks’s production suggests passions lurking beneath a polite, Rattiganesque surface and the acting is good. Paul Higgins doubles effectively as the buttoned-up Barry and his wimpish dad, and Adam Garcia appears twice in the role of a bisexual tempter. Bryony Hannah as Barry’s unreliable mum and Hugh Ross and Philip Bretherton as the uncles, who hide their love under the facade of English clubmen, are also on the money.
It’s not a major play but it offers a salutary reminder that, however relaxed the law, many people still lead lives of quiet, sexual desperation.
• At Park theatre, London, until 12 August. Box office: 020-7870 6876.
