My Night With Reg
By Kevin Elyot
The Newtown Theatre, Sydney
Until March 14
Review by Mark Stoyich
For the first time in human history, we live without fear of imminent death. For 50 years, disease and war have been held (temporarily?) at bay, with incalculably damaging effects on art and literature.
This element re-entered the western world in the '80s, when AIDS meant that once again healthy, middle-class people in their prime could be dead within a few agonising weeks. This grave development could have given us a revival in drama and literature in English. In fact, it's given us plays like My Night With Reg.
The plot is the classic "this one loves that one doesn't love this one" (or "Susannes' commercial", as it's known in the trade), which can work wonderfully in the hands of a Chekhov. In the hands of a Kevin Elyot, however, we have a sort of drawing-room comedy/tragedy that never takes off.
Nice guy Guy has just installed a conservatory in his flat, and is waiting nervously for friends to come and celebrate. He hopes to tell his friend from university days, Gary, a rugby hunk, of his secret love. Instead, Gary confides in Guy of his secret passionate affair with Reg. Reg's boyfriend turns up; he knows nothing.
In the next act, the friends meet in Guy's flat for Reg's wake — he's dead of AIDS. Guy flutters about preparing hors d'oeuvres, still unable to confess his love to Gary. The other guests quarrel and bitch.
In the next act, Guy is dead, Gary has inherited Guy's flat and conservatory and turns to the cute young handyman for consolation.
What is the point of all this? That true love and "meaningful" relationships are made impossible amongst gay men by their promiscuity? These gay characters seem to be no more promiscuous than the average straight — less, if the new English play Closer (Wharf Theatre) is to be believed.
AIDS (the word is never mentioned) becomes merely a convenient plot device to make characters disappear. The eponymous Reg is dead by act two, Guy by act three.
It's ironic, and it could be poignant if well played, that Guy, the most careful and least active of all the friends, is the one who gets the disease. Why is mortality so arbitrary? Why is fate so ironic? How much would it cost to build a conservatory in a flat?
My Night With Reg has been criticised for being old-fashioned (even the program mentions this). It is hard to believe it was written as recently as 1994, when AIDS had already faded from gay world to Third World disaster. It appears, however, to be set in the early '80s (I assume that was the point of all those vinyl record covers on the set).
Whenever, it's pretty irrelevant. Its problem is not that it's dated, but rather that it doesn't relate to any date at all, and would be irrelevant in all eras.
Why are most gay plays so bad? Replace the gay characters in most of them with straight men and women, and the problem is obvious.
If Love, Valour, Compassion! was nine out of 10 on the scale of egregiousness, Reg would be about five. The first, and best, Boys in the Band, was written when merely being gay was an issue. Now, something more is needed.
My stifling hot Sunday afternoon with Reg was shared with a packed hall (873 queens, four women) due to the Newtown Theatre's cunning publicity campaign (male nude torso on poster) aimed at those high-minded, spiritual values for which the gay "community" is noted.
They got, I hope, what they came for — two naked bodies (one very nice, one so-so, both too briefly glimpsed), and the occasional funny line much like the ones they'd exchange at home. The set was enormous and inexplicably elaborate given the venue. Does some friend of the designer intend to move in after the season?
The play is set in the summer, but an English summer, so the 45 degree heat in the hall destroyed any verisimilitude created by the set. The actors, sweating in their overcoats and suits, struggled manfully with their roles. Their English accents were all over the place — but who cares in that heat? I was just glad to see them survive the previews.