Twilight Song, Park Theatre, London, review: I got the sad impression of an author forced to race against the clock

'My Night With Reg' playwright Kevin Elyot's final play before he died in 2014, feels unpolished with parts of it more like undeveloped notes 

Paul Taylor
Wednesday 19 July 2017 12:25 BST
Comments
Bryony Hannah as Isabella in 'Twilight Song' at the Park Theatre
Bryony Hannah as Isabella in 'Twilight Song' at the Park Theatre

Kevin Elyot is best known for My Night With Reg, his tragicomic masterpiece of the AIDS era. He died in June 2014 and so, though he was involved in the preparations, he never got to see the Donmar's outstanding 20th anniversary revival, later that year. Now his final play, the 75-minute Twilight Song, receives its posthumous premiere in Anthony Banks's strongly cast production at the Park and the piece is steeped in Elyot's signature qualities – the knowing, slightly catty humour; the ardent wounded lyricism; and the sense of injuries echoing down the years in the highly-patterned temporal-hop plotting.

If there is an added poignancy here, though, it is not just because this swansong sounds so many consciously explicit warnings of the need to seize the day: “It's over in a minute; there's no time to fanny around...” declares a virile young gardener to the lady of the house. Occasionally, I also got the sad impression of an author forced to race against the clock. Had he been spared, might Elyot have expanded and buffed up some of the bits here that feel more like undeveloped notes than examples of his characteristic elegant economy?

The play is set in the sitting room of a Victorian villa in North London over a succession of summer evenings that shift back and forth between the 1960s and the present day. The first scene, set now, is a gem of queasy comic suggestiveness as we watch fifty-something mummy's boy and retired pharmacist Barry (Paul Higgins) show the family home to Aussie-born Skinner (Adam Garcia), an estate agent who oozes insinuation and discloses a sideline in selling his body. “In my book, every hole's a goal” is his motto. We then back-track to an evening in 1961 when Barry's equivalently ineffectual father Basil (likewise played by Higgins) was preparing to go out for supper at Le Caprice with his pregnant wife Isabella (Bryony Hannah), his gay uncle, Charles (Hugh Ross) and Charles's married lover, Harry (Philip Breterton).

Given the year, the latter pair are of course entirely closeted but the audience is privy to a painful row in which Harry seems to rebuff his friend's discreet affection and then to blame his insensitivity on money worries. The full explanation for this behaviour is not revealed until the scenes set in 1967 and the play is subtle about what the Sexual Offences Act of that year did and did not change in the attitudes to orientation within this family. It seems right that while Charles is now free to talk about his guilty feelings toward Harry, it does not occur to him to reveal to Isabella that he himself is gay or that they ever had a relationship, even though she has just made a colossal confession to him about her sex life.

Bryony Hannah radiates just the right degree of well-bred frustration and yearning as the disappointed wife. But I did not believe in her, for a moment, as the embittered seventy-five year old mother – cruelly invidious, clinging to spiritualists and lumbered with a reverie about her past that comes across as clumsy exposition. The musical transitions from scene to scene as methods of reproduction evolve – Tchaikovsky swelling from Dansette to thunderous iPod, say – sometimes feel a tad forced as if pumping up a lyricism that, to my mind, isn't as piercingly here as in some of Elyot's earlier work. A much-missed dramatist, though – whose first play Coming Clean opens next week in a rare revival at the King's Head.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in