Kevin Elyot: Playwright whose tender, witty piece 'My Night with Reg' captured the fears and anxieties of the age of Aids

Kevin Elyot: ‘My Night with Reg’ is being revived at the Donmar Warehouse next month

The loneliness that is the legacy of having once been loved, or of not being loved back, was an ever-present undertow in the writing of Kevin Elyot, who has died after a long illness. "I don't write stuff that is issue-led, it's not my style," he said in 2007. "I've touched upon themes, but it's not like a manifesto and doesn't in any sense preach."

His breakthrough script, My Night with Reg, which opened in 1994 at the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court (with career-best performances from John Sessions and David Bamber), won two Oliviers, an Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright and two West End transfers. While it may have shared the frankness of the "In-Yer-Face" movement that was the prevailing wind in British theatre at the time, it was in truth a tender tale, about a circle of gay friends assembling on three separate occasions: the absent Reg, the ghost at the feast, has slept with most of them and has since died of Aids.

It was a play about nostalgia, love lost, about being haunted by past pleasures, and how, perversely, realising one's desires can doom you to a life living in the shadow of past fulfilments – or even, in the age of Aids, in fear of paying the ultimate price. It was also a very funny piece, especially when plunging into bathos: in a prickly revelation from Bamber's character about being "taken advantage of" on holiday, he has the added indignity of confessing that it was by "a mortician from Swindon".

Kevin Elyot was born in Handworth, Birmingham in 1951, and educated at King Edward's school. He acted in school plays, played piano and sang in church choirs before going to Bristol University to take a degree in Theatre Studies. "I was a teenager when homosexuality was decriminalised. I certainly wasn't bullied at school, so I think I was very lucky. I was probably wearing rose-tinted spectacles at the time – it was the Sixties after all," he once commented. But he was aware not everyone had the same experience, a recognition that informed his play The Day I Stood Still at the Cottesloe in 1998, which evoked a Sixties in which every barrier had been broken down except gay liberation.

He graduated in 1973 and began acting on the booming London Fringe. In a production of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story at the Prince of Wales, Richmond the following year, he was identified by one critic as "a promising new talent… Jerry's emptiness was revealed quietly, but more devastatingly than I remember seeing before."

As an actor he was often crusading: he appeared regularly with Fringe troupe Gay Sweatshop (as in Edward Bond's allegorical Stone at the ICA in 1976 alongside Antony Sher), and a decade later starred in Anthony Davison's Screamers at the Croydon Warehouse. He was described as "stupendous" by The Stage for his performance in a James McLure double bill at the Bush in 1980: four years earlier there he'd been part of the carefully orchestrated chaos of the stage version of the Daily Mirror strip The Fosdyke Saga, which transferred to the ICA and was later captured for television.

His first play as a writer was Coming Clean, staged at the Bush in 1982. An explicit depiction of the eternal triangle, it won Elyot the 1982 Samuel Beckett Award. In 1986 he was awarded an Arts Council bursary, which he intended to use to write a play about the murder of film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, but what emerged instead was Consent, a poison pen letter to Section 28, Elyot shaping the plot and characters in workshops with a group of 16 drama students and five professional actors who then performed it at the Central Studio in Basingstoke.

Mouth to Mouth at the Royal Court in 2001, like My Night with Reg, transferred to the West End, and was again a play centred on a group of people gathering to dine but in fact chewing over past misfortunes and spitting out a lot of bitterness in the process. This time Elyot's focus was on a family, something he returned to in his last play at the Court, the cryptic Forty Winks (2004), which gave a home to a little of his Pasolini fascination and an early role to Carey Mulligan. Its use of the "visitation" device had eerie echoes of Dennis Potter, as a stranger turns up to unsettle the home of his now married ex-lover.

His last stage work was a mischievous tarting up of And Then There Were None at the Gielgud in 2005. It seemed a bamboozling departure, unless one knew that Elyot had been happily trotting out episodes of Poirot and Agatha Christie's Marple on television for the past few years. He said such work "kept his hand in", but he also won a Writer's Guild Award in 1991 for his first television play, Killing Time, and his Channel 4 drama Clapham Junction (2007), written to mark the 40th anniversary of the legalisation of homosexuality, was commendably strong meat. In a minor key, his dramatisation of Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (2005) was also a job well done, and transplanted his favourite theme of heartache to London in the 1930s.

Just as he was aware he had been luckier than some growing up, he was also aware things were still far from perfect as an adult. "We in the media live in a privileged and cocooned position as far as being gay is concerned, but I think if you work in a factory, you'd find it quite hard on a day-to-day basis."

My Night With Reg begins a revival at the Donmar Warehouse on 31 July. A defining play of the Nineties, it could have been written yesterday, and even if tomorrow's world sees an end to homophobia, while there is still loneliness and heartbreak, his work will always be relevant.

SIMON FARQUHAR

Kevin Lee (Kevin Elyot), actor and playwright: born Birmingham 18 July 1951; died 7 June 2014.