Researcher Ruth Houghton visited the Theatre Collection in 2023 to examine the Herbert Beerbohm Tree Business Archive. This blog highlights her reading room discoveries around Tree’s 1899-1900 production of King John, which have led to her 2024 article, published in the journal Law and Humanities (full details below).
King John is probably best known for sealing Magna Carta in 1215. Yet, this significant event in the constitutional history of Great Britain does not feature in Shakespeare’s play The Life and Death of King John; a fact that has preoccupied both literary and historical scholars. In contrast, 19th century productions of the play were littered with references to the Charter. From discussions in the programmes of the events at Runnymede to insertions into the very text of the play about the rights and liberties protected by Magna Carta, theatre producers across the century were reimagining the role of the Charter within the play.
No-one does this more spectacularly than Herbert Beerbohm Tree. In his 1899 production of King John at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London (which incidentally would go on to be the first filmed recording of a Shakespeare production), Beerbohm Tree staged a magnificent tableau – or living picture – depicting ‘The Granting of Magna Charta’.
HBT/40/1 Souvenir programme for King John at Her Majesty’s Theatre, 20 September 1899.
The tableau is often assumed to be silent, a ‘dumb-show’, which scholars have argued facilitated an a-political representation of Magna Carta as it allowed Beerbohm Tree to display the historical moment of the sealing of the Charter without praise or blame. (source: J. M. Lander and J. J. M. Tobin (eds) The Arden Shakespeare: King John (3rd edn, Bloomsbury 2018), p.102.)
However, documents in the Herbert Beerbohm Tree Business Archive give insight into the specific sounds and movements that accompanied the scene.
In the Stage [rehearsal] Notes of the tableau from the 13th September 1899, it states:
‘Super is holding document, puts it on table in front of JOHN, points to it for JOHN’S signature. After John has put his hand to the seal – inspiring music – then shout from everyone onstage.’
HBT/40/44 Stage Notes for King John at Her Majesty’s Theatre 1899-1900.
However, the Property Plot (undated but presumably created separately on a different day), details minor alterations that give an alternative approach to the scene:
‘Document is on table – Mr Tree [as King John] enters, goes towards table, man takes up document, gives it to Mr Tree, who reads it, looks round at Nobles, puts down the document, looks around again, then puts finger on paper – Music changes to ‘joyous rainbow’ strain – Mr Tree gives paper back to man – Loud cheers.’
HBT/40/13 Property Plot for King John at Her Majesty’s Theatre, 1899-1900.
The archive here uncovers a more complicated representation of the constitutional significance of the Charter. On 13th September, the pointing for a signature could be constructed as a visual representation of John being asked to submit, reluctantly, to the demand of the barons. In contrast, the longer stage direction of HBT/40/13 has the additional ‘gives paper back’, which is evocative of the idea that John gives the charter (almost magnanimously) to the people. Indeed, the ‘cheers’ in this rehearsal happen when the people are in possession of the Charter.
These two versions of the tableau found in the archives present distinct constitutional readings. Whilst one exaggerates the symbolism of the Charter as an act of holding a sovereign to account, the other places emphasis on the idea that the people now possess rights and liberties. These notes therefore offer a fascinating insight into how representations of Magna Carta in 19th century productions of King John can shed light on the perception and development of the Charter’s constitutional status during this period.
The Herbert Beerbohm Tree Business Archive is housed in the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.
This research has been published in Houghton, R. (2024). ‘Performing a constitution: a history of Magna Carta in Shakespeare’s King John’. Law and Humanities, 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/17521483.2024.2370673.
As a writer-in-residence at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, I’ve spent time researching the papers of the playwright and screenwriter Kevin Elyot (1951-2014). Here is my fifth article in response to Elyot’s archive, in which I discuss his fourth play Mouth to Mouth. A general reflection on Elyot is here. I’ve also written about Coming Clean (1982), My Night with Reg (1994), and The Day I Stood Still (1998).
My year with Kev: moral questions
Two moral questions arose for me during my time in the playwright Kevin Elyot’s archive as the recipient of the 2023 Kevin Elyot Award.
My stated aim to the award’s panel was to write about Elyot – but I’m a playwright, not a biographer, and the first question was, simply, is this right?
Elyot was guarded about himself in interviews, and, as his agent Sebastian Born told me, did not share early ideas or drafts with others:
Kevin’s plays always arrived fully formed. He was superstitious about saying anything about what he was working on, so every once in a while I would receive a brown envelope containing his latest play. Such a thrill for an agent.1
Not unexpectedly, the archive reveals things Elyot withheld from journalists, as well as the hard work – pages of notes, multiple drafts – behind those ‘fully formed’ plays. With his notebooks, letters, research materials, press cuttings, and photographs, I was privy to some of Elyot’s innermost fears, tastes, resentments, pains, joys – and some of his personal opinions on friends and collaborators.
I was able to quell my unease about this strange intimacy with Elyot fairly quickly. I assumed that had he not wanted people to make discoveries about his life and practice, he’d have destroyed his papers. Besides, the yearly award – funded by an endowment given to the University of Bristol by members of Elyot’s family – exists to inspire writers in their own practice. It asks them to consider not only Elyot’s published and produced work, but the life and work behind that work. The materials are there to be read, and I began to understand the award as an act of artistic serial reciprocity, a tip of Elyot’s cap to succeeding generations.
The second moral question was how relevant are Elyot’s papers to my understanding of his performed and published work?
It’s obvious that Elyot drew from personal experience to write his plays, and there’s a lot in his notes about what he intended the plays to do. So it’s tempting to disregard the biographical and intentional fallacies – those (in my view) sound and helpful twentieth-century critical theories – and read the work via the life. Elyot argued in a column in The Telegraph in 2001 that if art reflects the artist, ‘this is only part of the story,’ yet at the same admitted,
Whether a play is about a schoolboy love affair or a satire on the power of the multinationals, it will only work if the writer taps an emotional core and thus, to some degree, reveals himself.2
The central character in Elyot’s fourth original play Mouth to Mouth is a playwright called Frank. When asked by the journalist Heather Neill at the time of the play’s premiere in 2001, ‘does Frank equal Kevin?’, Elyot could not quite deny it:
That’s a difficult one. Everything I write is a bit autobiographical, but I’m in all the characters.3
His piercingly honest, funny, moving and often troubling plays simply have the feel of being personal.
In the end, I decided to make myself comfortable on the fence. Sometimes Elyot’s papers elucidate the work, but the work stands on its own. On the one hand, I prefer to look at texts as texts – on the other, these articles are the reflections of a playwright, not academic research papers, so I don’t have to take any notice of the biographical and intentional fallacies.
All I’ve been able to do, as someone who admires Elyot’s writing, is reread his published plays, immerse myself in his papers, and call it as I see it.
As I see it, his archive reveals two key things about Elyot.
The first is that his notes are not dissimilar from his six original plays, in that there is a steady repetition of ideas. As I’ve written elsewhere, Elyot was a hedgehog of a playwright, a Proustian obsessed with the same themes: the recovery of the past, repressed desire, the Forsterian need to connect, music, betrayal, guilt, mortality. In an early notebook for The Day I Stood Still, he wrote:
Because he was preoccupied with ‘the usual,’ his projects intersected, and some notebooks resist the archivist’s ex post facto categorisation. Elyot’s method, in his own words at the time of Mouth to Mouth, was ‘to make lots of notes over a long period. Hopefully something emerges that I can fashion into a play.’5 He discussed this process more expansively with Harriet Devine in 2005:
DEVINE: […] how does it happen that an idea for a play comes along? Is it always the same process? Does something happen that sparks it off?
ELYOT: It might be a moment that intrigues me, or – it can start off in the oddest way. And really it makes me sound a bit capricious and maybe rather shallow because, while some playwrights might sit down to write a play about Guantanamo, or the Health Service, I tend to write a play because I want to see two people doing a tango, or want to hear a piece of music in juxtaposition to something else. And then gradually you put pieces together over a length of time, and shape something out of it.6
Elyot’s reworking of the same themes – not ‘shallow’ themes, yet not overtly political ones – combined with his process of starting with ‘fragments’ (Devine’s word), meant that plays developed concurrently. In a notebook assigned by the Theatre Collection to The Day I Stood Still, he wrote in capitals, ‘WRITE TWO PLAYS!’, and although the play he developed in this book is indeed The Day I Stood Still, many of its ‘fragments’ form the basis for his next play.7 Early on he wrote, ‘Wife: Lindsay’ – a reference to his friend the actor Lindsay Duncan, for whom he created the part of Laura in that play, eventually called Mouth to Mouth.8 A few pages later, he wrote:
THE STORY:
X. falls for son of friends (wife + hubby). Starts rel. underage. So X. is having son. Wife’s having affair.9
Here, Elyot discovered the essential plot of Mouth to Mouth – the secret betrayal by her gay best friend of a wife who has her own secret – as he shaped The Day I Stood Still.
Press night ticket, West End transfer, University of Bristol Theatre Collection, KE/3/26/5
Vulnerable playwright
The second key thing Elyot’s papers reveal is his self-doubt, an insecurity slightly at odds with the acerbic persona he projected in interviews (and which friends and colleagues have written about since his death) though not necessarily with characters like Guy in My Night with Reg, Horace in The Day I Stood Still and Frank in Mouth to Mouth, who all struggle with diffidence, and whose unexpressed secrets fuel the plays’ plots.10
Elyot was, I think, self-conscious about ‘the usual,’ aware that to plough the same territory over and over was to risk not discovering new story treasures, and to risk being criticised for repeating himself.
In a Day I Stood Still notebook he wrote, ‘Squash all opposition with some big, assured laughs + bold dramatic strokes’ – his apprehension about ‘opposition’ is revealing.11
A galvanising message to himself in a Mouth to Mouth notebook is wise, and inspiring to anyone who reads it. But there is a poignancy to it; in my view, only a vulnerable artist could have written it:
FORGET FASHION, what’s expected, comedy per se, rivals – WRITE what’s true, what’s true to you, ignore EVERYBODY, write a TRAGEDY, reach for the truth of life, aim high, write a masterpiece. Amaze + surprise them.12
Mouth to Mouth: a moral question
Wonderfully, Elyot, a gay, HIV-positive playwright, a waspish and quick-witted Proustian who was nevertheless insecure about his writing and worried about repeating himself, harnessed his insecurity and experience of chronic illness to write a masterpiece about – I want to groan, and yet! – a gay, witty, insecure, HIV-positive and Proustian playwright, who, suffering from writer’s block, laments to Laura (his best friend, that ‘Wife’ in the The Day I Stood Still notebook) that he is ‘always being accused of writing about the same thing.’13
I suggest that any blocked and/or insecure writer reading this should refrain from taking heart from it: surely no one should write dramas about not being able to write. Yet somehow, with Mouth to Mouth, Elyot produced a stylish, droll and deeply disturbing meditation on a moral question: should writers draw from real life? Can they, if it involves betrayal of loved ones? Can writing only ever be a sharp practice?
The play has a palindromic structure and begins with a scene in which we glean that something terrible has happened – ‘unimaginably tragic’ as Frank says later – and that Frank has things he needs to confess to Laura.14 We flash back, then forward, to discover what these things are – and that everyone, not just Frank, has his or her own guilts and secrets.
In the final scene we return, according to a palindrome, to the first scene, and climactically get the answer to the question we have seen Frank grappling with throughout: should I use my life, the things that have happened to me and that I have made happen, to create my art?
In one reading, the answer is no: Frank will not plunder his life, and will not exacerbate the trauma of his best friend Laura, whose son, we now know, has died in a dreadful accident.
But human beings are complex creatures, and though he says he wants to, Frank never confesses his secrets/sins to Laura, perhaps in part because without her knowledge he discovers the secret of her affair. Typically for Elyot, there is more than one reading.
Press night ticket, West End transfer, University of Bristol Theatre Collection, KE/3/26/5
For a late draft of My Night with Reg, Elyot used two epigraphs: a passage from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s posthumous novel The Leopard, which survived into Reg’s published edition; and a passage from Patrick White’s 1976 novel A Fringe of Leaves:
‘… Would you not say that life is a series of blunders rather than any clear design, from which we may come out whole if we are lucky?’15
Elyot dropped the White from Reg’s rehearsal draft onwards, but it was a very interesting idea, because the play and all of Elyot’s subsequent plays including Mouth to Mouth are scrupulously well-designed, yet peopled by characters blundering through life, barely coming out whole. The design of art can (should?) be elegant, but, first-rate playwright that he was, Elyot was utterly fearless when it came to the messy ‘truth of life’ for the characters inside his design – Truth as Hilary Mantel sees it in her memoir Giving Up the Ghost:
Truth isn’t pretty […] and the pursuit of it doesn’t make pretty people. Truth isn’t elegant; that’s just mathematicians’ sentimentality. Truth is squalid and full of blots, and you can only find it in the accumulation of dusty and broken facts, in the cellars and sewers of the human mind.16
Mouth to Mouth’s epigraph is from the final volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time:
The whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer.17
and this lesson becomes a lifeline for the dying playwright Frank, who’s known, if he’s known at all, for a play about Proust called ‘A Piece of Cake’:
What happened [to Laura’s son] – was just awful – unimaginably tragic. It’s haunted me for a year. And the point is – I think it’d make quite a good play. You see, I’m coming round to the opinion that I have to use whatever’s thrown at me.18
Showing how it goes
Elyot was not Frank. As he said to Neill, ‘I’m in all the characters,’ and as he said to Mireia Aragay and Pilar Zozaya, playwriting is about making things up:
I don’t lead a life full enough to be able to write several plays about. I don’t do that much, and my daily routine is pretty boring, so I can’t be writing about that. It would be very dull to sit in a theatre watching it unfold. The key is to try and enter the world of the imagination.19
Yet the anxieties Elyot expressed in his notebooks about repeating himself with ‘the usual’ and running out of ideas, and even the point he made to Aragay and Zozaya about his uninteresting life, turn up in Mouth to Mouth:
FRANK: I’m finding it [writing] pretty difficult, to be honest. I can’t put my finger on why exactly –
LAURA: No ideas.
FRANK: That could be it. But no, I’m having quite a hard time. I’m always being accused of writing about the same thing.
LAURA: And what would that be?
FRANK: Well, me, as it happens, which simply isn’t true. They say it’s a sign of creative bankruptcy.
LAURA: I’d have thought personal experience was the only thing worth writing about.
FRANK: But my life isn’t that interesting, and if it were, I wouldn’t have the time to write about it.
In a lesser writer’s hands, these writerly anxieties might bore or irritate, seem like so much authorial moaning. But Frank is more complex than he appears – and I love how, as in Chekhov, his complexity is conveyed partly by the hilarious indifference with which he is treated by others. The exchange ‘Oh, I do wish tonight weren’t happening’ and ‘Yes, well … Nice olives’ is typical: we know there’s a world of torment and doubt inside Frank because Laura doesn’t really care and Frank must turn to the subject of olives.
All of Elyot’s dialogue is like this: crisp, funny and, most importantly, full of subtext. It is never self-righteous, but it demands its audience interrogate knotty moral questions and not-pretty truths about human beings:
We lie.
We are duplicitous.
And the artists among us are impelled by nature to use whatever treasures they find in their territory to create their art.
‘I wouldn’t dream of preaching,’ Elyot said, ‘I just show how it goes.’21
This work was inspired and developed through the generous support of the Kevin Elyot Award at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.
10 See, for example, Roger Michell and Robert Hastie in ‘Remembering Kevin,’ Introduction to My Night with Reg (London: Nick Hern Books, 1994, repr. 2013), pp. 8-10.
18 Ibid, pp. 27, 52. Elyot wrote a short ‘extract from “A Piece of Cake”’ in a notebook. Brilliantly, Proust does not get his memory-triggering madeleine, because a Young Man, replacing the indisposed waitress Clotilde (who ‘thinks she ate a suspect prawn for luncheon’), remembers his rosehip infusion but not his cake. When Proust realises the Young Man is English, he declares, ‘I suspect there is more to this than meets the eye,’ and the extract finishes. UBTC, KE/3/26/1, Book 3 of 3, pp. 3-4.
19 Elyot to Mireia Aragay and Pilar Zozaya, in British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics, ed. by Aragay, Hildegard Klein, Enric Monforte, Zozaya (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 70.
Hello again, sadly for the last time. Here we are, at the end of my time with the University of Bristol Theatre Collection and on the other side of my installation which showcased my artist-in-residence work in the Wickham Theatre back in early June.
The installation poster featuring original work from the John Vickers series of glass plate negatives. Image credit: John Vickers / Bobby Joynes
Looking back on this project, I am met with both immense fondness and sadness now that it has come to an end. The Where The Bonnie Heather Grows installation was my last practical installation in the university that I have called home for the last three years, as well as being the end point of my artistic-orientated research. I spent the best part of four solid days working very closely with the University of Bristol Theatre Department technicians to fully rig the space, construct from scratch the structure which had been in my mind’s eye for so long, and to calibrate the projected videos to perform in their intended way. After such a gruelling and physically exerting process, the installation was complete and finally ready to open to members of the public.
Throughout this project, I have personally reflected on the relationship that artists share with archives in the creation of new work. However, this period of time highlighted something which I feel needs drawing particular attention to: the relationship effected by archives on artists. More specifically, how artists serve as a conduit which connects the archive and its need for precision and accuracy with the pragmatic nature of technicians, producers and those who may work on a project like this one in some capacity but, having not done the research directly, might not understand the need of the artist for things to be done in certain ways.
Artist-in-residence Bobby Joynes pictured with lead UOB Drama Department technician James Lisk. Image credit: Tommy Tang
For others who walk a similarly intertwined path between these two elements, don’t underestimate the need for clarity and the distinction of open communication with those who you are working with.
The installation itself comprised two central elements: the projected space and a scrapbook which featured a response photographic series taken by me, which, when combined, asked its audiences if the destruction of something was more artistically beautiful than something which has been preserved.
The scrapbook. Image credit: Tommy Tang
Each of the elements had been directly extracted from my detailed research in the archive. The projected images, now turned into videos to accentuate their decay, were high resolution scans from John Vickers’ original 1920s glass plate negatives. The series of photographs taken by me were all initially monochromatic until double exposed with replicas of the mould-infested structures from the same series by Vickers. Each of these elements, interwoven together, served as a thought-provoking site for my question and for the exploration of my overall interest during the course of this placement: the relationship between the artist and the archive.
Audiences taking in the 360 degree projected space. Image credit: Tommy Tang
On entering the curated space, audiences were met with work that one visitor described as a “stunning use of the archive”, but which also served as “an extra dimension to the preservation and decay interrogation” (audience comments book). For me as the creator, it was really encouraging and enlightening to see people coming up to me with questions and becoming genuinely engaged and enthused by the materials in such similar ways to how I was first drawn to the series in the archive. I felt incredibly proud of what I had created, of course, but also an added sense of pride that I was able to bring John Vickers and his work from out of the depths of the archives again, after so many years, and to breathe new life into it again; for his photos to hold and similarly captivate as they did during his lifetime.
Discussions between Artist-in-residence Bobby Joynes & Dr Kirsty Sedgman about the space. Image Credit: Tommy Tang
Beginning this process of learning, I felt lucky to have had prior experiences with using archives. At the end of this artist-in-residence placement, I feel a great privilege to have been taught the value of the archive even more so, but to a point where I feel I have formed a working relationship with John Vickers. I’ve learnt that age and time really are just constructs in this kind of work, and that incredible work may just simply be another shelf away, wrapped neatly with archival tape, in an unsuspecting box.
Audiences were initially greeted with an exhibition outline which provided them with contextual information and the installation’s question. Image credit: Tommy Tang
On a final note, I would like to say a massive thank you to Jill Sullivan, Laura Dow, Nigel Bryant, Julian Warren and all the other members of staff at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection for welcoming me into your organisation and being some of the most well versed and knowledgeable people I have had the pleasure of working with. A massive thank you to Dr Kirsty Sedgman, James Lisk and Beth Bransome from the University of Bristol Theatre Department; without your attention, support and incredible capabilities, none of this would have been possible. Thank you to Becky Coster, Ines Sallis, Tommy Tang, Athena Gibson-Diamond and Jesse Prince for volunteering on this project, your support has meant the world, you’re all very dear to me. Finally, I wanted to say thank you to all those who managed to make it to the installation space! It was my pleasure to welcome you and the responses I collected will stay with me for the rest of my professional career.
Bobby
If you want to learn more about this process, or view the materials related to this project, all my physical and digital exhibition work has been donated to the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.
As the Kevin Elyot Award writer-in-residence at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, I have spent time researching the papers of the playwright and screenwriter Kevin Elyot (1951-2014). Here is my fourth article in response to Elyot’s archive, in which I discuss his third play – my favourite Elyot play – The Day I Stood Still. A general reflection on Elyot is here. My article on his debut Coming Clean (1982) is here. My article on his second and most famous play My Night with Reg (1994) is here.
It seems to me a lot of yearning goes on in your plays.
I think you’re right.
[…] It’s very obvious in My Night with Reg, isn’t it, where this poor guy has been living for God knows how many years on this moment where something could have happened that didn’t.
You should read The Day I Stood Still!
Kevin Elyot interviewed by Harriet Devine in 20051
The post-Reg syndrome
Kevin Elyot’s third original play The Day I Stood Still premiered on 22 January 1998 in the Cottesloe (now Dorfman) auditorium of the National Theatre, London. It was directed by Ian Rickson and starred Adrian Scarborough and Callum Dixon as old and young versions of the title character ‘I’ – that is Horace, a self-conscious single gay man in the mould of Guy in Elyot’s second play My Night withReg.
Sebastian Born, Elyot’s agent, told me how Rickson came to be the director:
Kevin was always cautious about to whom he would entrust his work and neither of us had seen anything directed by Ian. So we went to the spellbinding first preview of his production at the Ambassadors [Theatre] […] of a new play by an unknown Irish writer – The Weir [Conor McPherson]. Afterwards, Kevin didn’t say anything, just went up to Ian who was waiting in the foyer and said yes.2
Although The Day I Stood Still was well received – The Guardian thought it ‘an intelligent play about a common experience: the Proustian notion that the true paradise is the one that we have lost’ – there has been no major UK revival.3
It is possible that the much-acclaimed My Night with Reg has obscured Elyot’s other achievements: in 2014 The Telegraph thought so in a piece on theatrical ‘one-hit wonders,’ and recently a theatre producer I know of, when presented with the idea of The Day I Stood Still, responded, ‘I can’t sell that, but I can sell Reg.’4
Elyot himself told Veronica Lee in 2001,
I knew that Reg was always going to be a hard act to follow and the response would be more muted. I was anticipating the post-Reg syndrome and certainly never tried to cap it.5
It is a shame The Day I Stood Still is somewhat forgotten, because with it, in my view, Elyot did cap My Night with Reg. This beautifully constructed Chekhovian meditation on our yearning for youth as we age, and on the exquisite pain of unrequited love, is the apotheosis of Elyot’s career as a dramatic poet.
Kevin Elyot (1951-2014) photographed by Phil Fisk
The play: that awful moment
The play begins circa 1983 in Horace’s North London flat. He has just opened the door to an unexpected guest, Judy, the widow of Jerry, Horace’s old school friend; Jerry and Judy’s four-year-old son Jimi is Horace’s godson.
Horace loved Jerry – and just how immobilising this love has been is explored as the play jumps forward to 1996, when the 17-year-old Jimi visits Horace; then back to 1969, when Horace, Jerry and Judy are 17 and have the world at their feet.
The ‘crux,’ to use Elyot’s own word in his papers at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, comes on that day in 1969.6 While the Jimi Hendrix-obsessed Judy dozes (she’s drunk half a bottle of Dimyril), the talented pianist Jerry, stoned and with the munchies, shares a Mars Bar with Horace. ‘Go with a girl,’ Jerry says,
It’ll change your life.
HORACE (coping with Mars in the mouth): But I don’t want to! You must know that! I want to do it … I want to do it with you. Sorry.
Beat.
JERRY: You’ll meet loads of people.
HORACE: Yes, I might –
JERRY: Loads.
HORACE: But that wouldn’t change – doesn’t change – what I feel.
JERRY: There’ll be someone else.
HORACE: No, I don’t think there will.
They look at each other, face to face. Pause. For a second, they seem to get fractionally closer.
JUDY (coming round, in a strong Birmingham accent): Fucking beautiful!
This turning point was sketched by Elyot in one of his notebooks for the play:
[Horace] can’t rid himself of Jerry, whereas Jerry’s on verge of moving on (with girls / Judy). THAT awful moment when when [sic] you realize someone’s developed, moving on to next stage, + you’re still in the same place. **THIS CRUCIAL.8
By the time we get to this ‘awful moment’ in the play’s third scene, we know the Horace of 1983 and 1996, so we know that he’s right when he says there’ll be no one else (and that he will always have an unhealthy relationship with Mars Bars).
In the opening 1983 scene, a masterclass in the art of subtle dramatic exposition, Judy captures Horace’s character in two crisp insults. Concerning the flat, which he inherited from his parents and which has seen better days, she says, ‘You’ll take root.’9 Upon learning he is still in the same job – in a museum, if the point that he is one of life’s museum pieces has been missed – she says, ‘You’ll ossify’.10
As a character, Horace never ossifies because Elyot’s three scenes are always alive with promise, danger and poignancy. In 1996, the arrival of the 17-year-old Jimi, AWOL from boarding school after being rejected by a boyfriend (a story that mirrors Horace and Jerry’s), ignites in Horace a sense of godfatherly responsibility and transgressive possibility – as well as stirring nostalgia. ‘There was one day,’ he reflects, after Jimi asks about the father Jimi never knew,
one day we had – when I met your mother, actually – which was sort of complete. One of those moments in life when you realise, ‘Ah, that’s what it’s like to be happy.’ […] When I’m dying, it’s that moment that’ll make me think it was all worthwhile. My life crystallized in the memory of a moment. It was like we were outside time.11
In 1969, this idyll of youth – ‘idyll’ is Elyot’s own descriptor for the scene – is vitalised by youth’s romanticism, then destroyed by youth’s unthinking cruelty when Jerry goes off with Judy.12 His act, ‘that awful moment,’ paralyses Horace forever. And yet – partly thanks to the scene with Jimi, partly to a subplot involving interrupted sex with a prostitute – Horace’s life always feels on the verge of movement, of something ‘worthwhile.’ Elyot pulls off a sophisticated trick: dramatic momentum in a play about inaction.
National Theatre brochure, original production (University of Bristol Theatre Collection, KE/3/23/4)
The painful craft of playwriting: leitmotifs, irony, coincidence
It is Elyot’s crafty manipulation of stage time that lends The Day I Stood Still much of this vigour: in its director Rickson’s words, we as audience are put ‘in a very empowered position’ because as the first two scenes give way to the third, we know more about the characters’ fates than they do – a dramatic technique that recalls J.B. Priestley’s Time and the Conways and Harold Pinter’s Betrayal.13
This is inevitably affecting – the dreams of youth look pitiable when we know they won’t come true – and our feeling for the characters as subjects of Time is intensified by Elyot’s careful orchestration of leitmotifs, of recurring themes and artefacts. The Mars Bars are like Proust’s madeleines: they – along with a perilously rickety chair, a chain Jerry gives to Horace, and the Beethoven Jerry plays on Horace’s piano – keep reappearing, building into a kind of symphony of memory and irony.
At the centre is the most ironic thing of all, a Wildean tragedy: Horace kills the thing he loves. In 1969, Jerry suggests to Horace he ‘could write a novel.’14 He does, and thirteen years later, sends Jerry a copy. This is the cause of Jerry’s death: he gets blood-poisoning after nicking his finger on ‘the silvery thing […] holding together [the] manuscript.’15
Elyot loved coincidence, and arguably this is a coincidence too far; perhaps Alastair Macaulay in the Financial Times thought so when he objected to the play’s ‘excessive neatness.’16 Yet as contrived as Horace’s (accidental) complicity in Jerry’s death is, it is so subtly embedded into the play’s texture, and so tragicomically right for both the hapless Horace and the romantic Jerry, that it works.
I view it as a supreme piece of dramaturgical handiwork, and I found it fascinating to discover how this kind of elegant formal conceit, typical of Elyot, belies his unsystematic writing process. Notebooks in his archive scrawled with ideas support his comment to Rickson that
I started coming at The Day I Stood Still from several angles and made copious notes for a couple of years. Then little catalysts would happen – a photograph, a piece of music – and gradually I saw a pattern emerging.17
This was his method for all of his original plays: ‘you put pieces together over a length of time,’ he told Harriet Devine in 2005, ‘and shape something out of it.’18 My sense – and this is hardly a surprise to a writer – is that this process could be painful. On page one of the first The Day I Stood Still notebook he wrote, ‘“Vanya” as model,’ then, perhaps overwhelmed by his invocation of Chekhov, told himself, ‘DON’T TURN another play into an Everest!’ Later, his playwriting competition tormented him: ‘Pinter wrote play in 4 weeks!’ Elsewhere, he girded himself in the red pen he saved for his most important notes:
GET ON with play. DON’T tell anyone. Take them by surprise.19
Play text published by Nick Hern Books; author photograph by David Whyte
An artist of survival
Elyot did get on with it, and in the four years after My Night with Reg fashioned a most moving play, one that shares with Uncle Vanya a love triangle in which the title character is the loser – to use one critic’s phrase, Horace is, like Uncle Vanya, ‘one of nature’s Plain Jane gooseberries.’20 Devine told Elyot ‘that tears were just pouring down [the] face’ of a friend who saw the original production; Elyot responded that ‘it did seem to have an effect on people.’21 I remember being one of them: even in my cheap seat in the gods of the National Theatre’s Cottesloe, I was touched by Horace’s tragic yet still somehow sardonic, somehow optimistic loneliness.
In Scene One, Judy tells Horace he should be ‘doing things and going places,’ but he responds,
I don’t want to. I’m fine as I am. I like this place, and I’ve got my music, my books, a friend or two. Honestly, Jude, I’m okay. I’m fairly happy.22
In his notes, Elyot quoted Clive James:
Beethoven wrote the Appassionata because he had no one to be passionate with – as any kind of artist, that’s your consolation.
and he reworked this into his play:
HORACE: What would I write a novel about?
JERRY: I don’t know. Love, death, murder, passion –
HORACE: I don’t have anyone to be passionate about, do I?
JERRY: That’s no excuse. Beethoven wrote the Appassionata and he had no-one to be passionate about.23
Outwardly, Horace is not an artist – the novel that kills Jerry is the only thing he ever writes. But in fact I think he is: he is an Artist of Survival, as we all must be if we are to live in this world. He survives on Mars Bars, that is, on his love for Jerry – even though that love is unreturned and Jerry is dead for two thirds of the play. He has no ambition, and returns over and over to ‘that awful moment’ when he stood still (Elyot considered the title Square One).24 Yet he is ‘fairly happy,’ and it’s hard not to admire a chap so cheerfully philosophical about life’s anti-climaxes:
I’m not that keen on travel, you know. I like watching travel programmes and I find that kind of enough. Going’s always a let-down, don’t you think?25
This is relatable, bittersweet stuff, and after he saw the play, the composer Gary Yershon wrote Elyot a letter in which he asked, ‘Ah, Kevin […] Who since Chekhov brings laughter and tears together as powerfully as you?’ He answered his own question: ‘No one. I am lost in admiration.’26
I would love to see a revival.
This work was inspired and developed through the generous support of the Kevin Elyot Award at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.
1 Harriet Devine, Looking Back: Playwrights at the Royal Court, 1956-2006 (London: Faber, 2006), p. 112.
3 Michael Billington, Guardian, 23 January 1998, University of Bristol Theatre Collection (UBTC), KE/3/23/5.
4 Dominic Cavendish, ‘All hail theatre’s one-hit wonders’, The Telegraph, 12 June 2014.
5 Kevin Elyot to Veronica Lee, ‘Putting “Reg” to bed with a bit of mouth-to-mouth’, [n.p.; perhaps The Times] [n.d.], interview at the time of Mouth to Mouth, 2001, UBTC, KE/3/26/5.
13 Ian Rickson in ‘Ian Rickson and Kevin Elyot in conversation’ (November 1997), National Theatre programme for The Day I Stood Still, UBTC, KE/3/23/4.
As the 2023 Kevin Elyot Award writer-in-residence at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, I have written a series of articles on the original plays of the playwright and screenwriter Kevin Elyot (1951-2014). Here is my third, on his second and most famous play My Night with Reg. A general reflection on Elyot is here. My piece on his debut play Coming Clean (1982) is here.
Rejection and triumph
Kevin Elyot’s second play My Night with Reg took him twelve years to write. It made his name.
Set in the 1980s, it is a tragicomedy about seven gay men in North London living in the shadow of Aids. One of them, Reg, never appears though his impact on the others is profound – a Waiting for Godot-like conceit in a play built upon several elegant formal conceits.
Elyot was commissioned to write the play by London’s Hampstead Theatre, but in mid-1993 it was rejected: my analysis of that rejection, according to my reading of the relevant documents in Elyot’s archive at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, is here.
Since I wrote that piece, Sebastian Born, Elyot’s agent, told me that a reading of the play at Hampstead was ‘for some reason the worst, flattest experience of any reading I’ve ever attended.’ After Elyot and Hampstead parted ways, Born ‘tried to reassure a depressed author that there would be interest elsewhere.’ He sent the play to the Royal Court Theatre, then under the artistic directorship of Stephen Daldry, and a few days later, the literary department expressed an interest.1
On 31 March 1994, My Night with Reg premiered at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs in a production directed by Roger Michell.
It was critically acclaimed, transferred to the Criterion Theatre in the West End, published by Nick Hern Books, garnered Elyot the 1995 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy, and was filmed for the BBC by Michell with its original cast.
Tickets from opening night, 1994. (University of Bristol Theatre Collection, KE/3/19/3)
The play: a play with time
My Night with Reg is a beautifully constructed play in three scenes.
In Scene One, old University of Bristol friends Guy, John and Daniel (the allusions to Elton John are deliberate) gather for a housewarming at Guy’s flat. When Daniel leaves, John confesses to Guy that he is having an affair with Reg, Daniel’s boyfriend, who is due at the housewarming. This is a terrible blow to Guy, as he harbours a secret love for John.
With Scene Two comes the first of two coups de théâtre, and Elyot’s own words in one of his notebooks can convey it:
at the start […] we think it’s the FLATWARMING, but are jerked on a year or so to realise it’s a WAKE + Reg’s at that!!!2
Reg has died of Aids – and gradually, we understand that everyone at the wake has slept with him.
Everyone, that is, except for Guy.
In Scene Three, all of Reg’s lovers are still alive – but now, ironically, it is Guy who has died of Aids (the result of non-consensual sex in Lanzarote with ‘a mortician from Swindon’).3 The setting remains Guy’s flat: he has left it to John. This second time-jump is even more startling than the first, and particularly heartbreaking, as Guy is so dedicated to safe sex that according to Daniel he ‘masturbates in Marigolds.’4
The fate of the play’s central figure, a self-conscious and good-natured chap inhibited by his unrequited love for John, lends the writing a deep – Chekhovian – sense of yearning and sadness.
Sex in a time of Aids
Obviously, much of this is tragic, and by the end of Scene Three, the audience feels the terrible weight of the men’s collective losses.
And yet at the same time, it has experienced a play that is a celebration – a celebration of gay friendship, and of gay sex. Throughout, Elyot’s characters, most of whom came of age during the heady 1970s, are brazenly sexual, wittily gay in all senses, even in the face of the new and cruel threat to their erotic lives after the liberations of their salad days. Double entendres in both the stage direction and dialogue in the fourth line of Scene One tell the audience what to expect –
GUY: (Taking it off [an apron]. I was just stiffening some egg whites.
– and this passage reflects the general tone:
They embrace again. DANIEL mauls JOHN’s backside.
DANIEL: Darling, it’s dropped!
JOHN: Fuck off!
DANIEL: Dropped, dropped, dropped! At least two inches! It’ll be dragging on the floor before the night’s out.
JOHN tweaks one of DANIEL’s nipples. DANIEL shrieks. ERIC looks on.
The sexual freedoms gay men discovered in the 1970s had been celebrated and interrogated by Elyot in his first play Coming Clean, which premiered at London’s Bush Theatre at the end of 1982, just before Aids had really made its terrible mark. In the twelve years between the two plays, a busy Elyot wrote several adaptations, and Killing Time, an original and award-winning film for the BBC. But there is a sense in his notebooks that the Aids crisis was unsettling to his playwriting: he struggled to deal with the shock of loss – the loss of lovers and friends, and the loss of sex without consequence. He was a writer interested in shame-free gay sexuality who wanted to
MAKE THEATRICAL POETRY out of casual sex, a casual pick-up.6
‘FUCK THE MORALISTS!’ he wrote,
Ruffle the feathers of the activists. Make it dead dangerous.7
For some time, he imagined Reg as a sequel to Coming Clean, with some of the same characters and arguments in that play about the gay ‘scene’ and promiscuity. Over and over in his notebooks he took the ‘non-monogamy’ position of Coming Clean’s Greg:
The thesis is that gays shouldn’t regret their lifestyle prior to Aids.
Non-monogamy – show it as a positive way of life, warts + all.
Remember, I’m not only showing gays being lustful + potentially promiscuous, but they’re being so at a wake of a guy who’s died of Aids! This is a good, exiting idea – don’t be despondent.8
Elyot imagining a production, when his idea was a sequel to Coming Clean (UBTC, KE/3/19/1, 3 of 6 [n.p.])
A unique Aids play
The knotty question Elyot grappled with here is not so different from the central question in Éric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s, the third film in Six Moral Tales which gives Reg its title: can we reconcile the physical and the moral? As the years passed, Elyot refined his ideas and abandoned the notion of the play as a sequel – and what he ultimately shaped dramatises the terrible new reality of the 1980s, a reality that does not complicate the question for Rohmer’s 1960s characters: the physical can equal death.
Write a gay play for today – the threat of Aids and the ensuing temptation + frustration.9
But – and such dramaturgical subtlety is an improvement on Coming Clean – Aids is never mentioned by name. It hovers in the background as the interconnections between the men become clear to the audience in a paradoxically light-hearted, La Ronde-like fashion.
My Night with Reg is, then, unlike other great Aids dramas of the 1980s and early-90s such as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: it is not agitprop against government inaction and systemic homophobia. Elyot even went so far as to claim, ‘It’s not “about Aids”. I can’t do that sort of writing.’10
It is, in Alan Sinfield’s words, an ‘unAmerican, unheroic version of AIDS – wry and understated, furtive and thwarted.’11
A serious comedy
And, with its killer lines, funny. The comedy – like all of Elyot’s plays, it can be described as a comedy of manners – upset some sections of the gay press, and in an interview with Elyot in 1998, a scolding Gay Times quoted a passage from Edmund White’s 1987 article ‘Aesthetics and Loss’:
Avoid humour, because humour seems grotesquely inappropriate to the occasion. A sniggering or wise-cracking humour puts the public (indifferent when not uneasy) on cosy terms with what is an unspeakable scandal: death. […] Humour suggests that Aids is just another calamity to befall Mother Camp.12
Since the play’s premiere, other writers have criticised it for political tameness, and anti-queerness: as every character is likely to have Aids, and the final effect is one of loss, it has been accused of being excessively pessimistic or even, as Enric Monforte argues, ‘a metaphor for the erasure of gay subjectivity’ since one by one the characters ‘disappear in a literal sense.’13
But why should My Night with Reg take White’s position concerning Aids and comedy? Why should it take the political position of Kramer or Kushner (both exhilaratingly angry in their landmark plays about heterosexual indifference or hostility towards one of the great health crises of the twentieth century)? There are different kinds of playwrights and plays, different responses to the same human predicaments. As an actor, Elyot had acted in the political theatre of Gay Sweatshop in the 1970s and early-80s, but as a playwright, he could not find meaning through agitprop:
Been there, done that. I enjoyed acting it, but I can’t write it because I find that rather simplistic. Life is too full of shades of grey. Some writers can write a state-of-the-nation piece, or a political work – I can’t. As for writing a ‘gay’ play, like say Normal Heart, I just can’t bear that sort of preachiness. Normal Heart is a terrible play.14
Elyot was a gay man who came of age in the 1970s, and he was dubious of monogamy, and Reg scrutinises what he saw as the necessity of lies in human relationships. It shows gay men who betray themselves and each other – as all human beings do – and these betrayals are dramatised in a camp, funny, knowing diction familiar to many LGBT people. Even in the face of death, the play refuses to preach. Even in the face of death, it refuses to let go of the language of gay sexual liberation that defined Elyot’s characters in the 1970s, and defined Elyot himself.
The meeting of that language with Rohmer’s moral question, in a world complicated by Aids, is authentic: to use that vapid contemporary phrase, it is a meeting forged from ‘lived experience’. ‘If you are writing well,’ Elyot argued, ‘you are touching on something that resonates with you and then it’s a truthful piece of writing.’15 He was evasive when asked whether his plays were autobiographical, but he defended himself to Gay Times:
One of the starting points for writing Reg was personal experience. I’ve suffered in similar ways to other gay men of my generation, experienced the same grief, loss and trauma.16
Ultimately, Elyot’s position in Reg (and other plays) is a tragicomic position true to himself – and that position is, in any case, Shakespearean. In the words of Alan Hollinghurst,
Elyot himself has gone, but his plays survive, to haunt, to disconcert and, in a favourite line of his from Love’s Labour’s Lost, ‘To move wild laughter in the throat of death.’17
Sometimes, Reg argues, the tragedy of Aids – the pain of any tragedy – can be conveyed by the ways people emerge from their grief, loss and trauma, or fight them, with camp, with wit, with double entendre.
Play texts published by Nick Hern Books in 1994 and 2013
Inexpressible loss
And sometimes, there are no words to be found, comic or otherwise, for the sheer scale of the tragedy.
For many words about Aids, important words, we have plays by Kramer and Kushner. For the sense of the inexpressibility of loss in the time of Aids, we have the plays of Elyot; and in the end, I most admire his writing for the same reason as the journalist David Benedict:
The distinguishing mark […] is his rare confidence in leaving things unsaid, allowing the actors to finish the thoughts.18
In My Night with Reg’s final scene, there’s a wonderful example.
Guy is dead, and Daniel has visited John in what is now John’s flat. It is early morning and the birds are singing. Eric, the play’s archetypal gay youth, is in the kitchen making coffee. We know that both Daniel and John have slept with Reg. John has not admitted to his friend his betrayal. We also know – somehow we just know – that both men are likely to have contracted HIV, and that in the play’s unseen Scenes Four, Five, Six, the wakes will continue. The stage direction says the men ‘kiss affectionately,’ then:
DANIEL: I think I’ll go. I’m suddenly very tired. Apologise to Eric, will you?
JOHN: Yes.
DANIEL goes to the door.
JOHN: Dan?
DANIEL stops and turns. They look at each other. A couple of other birds have joined in the singing.
DANIEL: Yes?
Beat.
JOHN: I’m pretty tired, too. I haven’t been sleeping too well lately.
I will never forget this moment in Roger Michell’s original production. I remember it particularly because of John’s line, ‘I’m pretty tired, too,’ which from the actor Anthony Calf was, to my ears, a primal scream, ringing with subtext:
I want to be honest with you, my dear old friend, honest with you about my betrayal of you with Reg – but I also want to tell you that I think my body is being attacked, that the physical in fact leads to sickness, that my exhaustion tells me I’m dying, are you dying too, what happened to our glorious youth, Dan, help me please, my dear old friend, poor Guy, what are we all going to do?
It takes courage to write like this – to keep so much unsaid – even though such dialogue holds a mirror to the games of intimation, elusion, allusion and self-delusion that human beings play every single day of our lives.
Anyone interested in playwriting, or how plays reflect life, should study the passage: it’s a superlative example of less is more, of showing not telling, of Elyot’s great talent at compassionately and truthfully depicting flawed human beings trying to come to terms with things outside of their control.
This work was inspired and developed through the generous support of the Kevin Elyot Award at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.
10 Elyot to David Benedict, ‘Theatre: National debut? Time to put the record, er, straight’, Independent, 12 January 1998.
11 Alan Sinfield, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 328.
12 Edmund White, quoted in James Cary Parkes, ‘A comedy of terrors’, Gay Times, January 1998, pp. 16-17 (p. 17), UBTC, KE/3/23/5.
13 Enric Monforte, ‘English Gay/Queer Theatre in the 1990s: Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking’, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 54 (April 2007), pp. 195-206 (p. 201).
14 Elyot to Veronica Lee, ‘Putting “Reg” to bed with a bit of mouth-to-mouth’, [n.p.; perhaps The Times] [n.d.], interview at the time of Mouth to Mouth, 2001, UBTC, KE/3/26/5.
