Belated premiere of a slight and fitfully affecting swansong
Twilight Song Park Theatre, N7
It’s a crying shame that Kevin Elyot didn’t live to see the Donmar’s exquisite 20th-anniversary revival of his adamantine classic My Night
With Reg, perhaps the most highly regarded play about modern gay lives of its era. He died in June 2014; the production, which went on to the West End, opened that August.
I feel less sorry on his behalf, though, about this world premiere of his final play, staged at the increasingly reputable Park, which has a nice Donmar-y vibe to it. Much as I wish to acclaim it, the play proves a slight, only fitfully affecting swan song that bulks up his back catalogue without adding much value to his stock.
In its title, Twilight Song recalls Noël Coward’s Song at Twilight (1966), in which an elderly successful writer is confronted with epistolary evidence of his hushed-up homosexuality. Here, reprising his fondness for gliding between different (often socially distinct) periods, and confirming his fascination with the lasting damage done by imposed sexual “norms”, Elyot shows us the same north London Victorian villa across 1961, 1967 and the austerity-struck “present-day” (a reference to “lard-arsed Etonians” inadvertently conjuring the near vanished age of Call Me Dave).
The play starts in the here and now (then rewinding), and its initial tone is of subtle melancholy colliding with meat-market bluntness. Paul Higgins’s Barry is a shy fiftysomething still living with his mother who has taken advantage of the latter’s away-day in Dunstable (at a seance) to invite an estate agent over to value the property, only to be met with increasingly crude advances. “I thought you had a little twang,” Barry tells the presumptuous professional (and sideline rent boy) on learning he was raised Down Under – which earns one of several, innuendo-prompted laughs but exemplifies a rather cardboard quality in the writing.
As the action proceeds (by jumping back to far less sexually liberated times), we’re introduced to Barry’s strait-laced anaesthetist father, Basil (played again by Higgins) and his pregnant mother, Isabella (Bryony Hannah), then dutifully meek but already on the gin, contemplating their new home in the company of drop-in guests uncle Charles and his old chum Harry. The glimpses we get of this aged, dufferish duo’s repressed intimacies – with Hugh Ross’s Charles furtively pleading for the contact that his married pal now refuses to give – lends the evening (only 75 minutes long) a strong scent of pathos, alas too swiftly dispelled.
Skimping on fully rounded characterisation, Elyot makes Isabella a gorgon drunken wife (falling for a Mills-and-boonsy gardener, played by Adam Garcia) and then a gorgon drunken mother, rejecting Barry, and mourning (hence the seance) her second, cuckoo-in-the-nest offspring.
The lighting darkens as this monster matriarch (an allusion to Hitchcock’s Psycho is crowbarred in) shuffles across the living room on her walking frame to gripe at the night, but the strongest impression, which Anthony Banks’s uneven production can’t disguise, is of Elyot’s fading dramatic powers. A case of been there, done that – only better.
Until Aug 12. Tickets: 020 7870 6876; parktheatre.co.uk