Theatre
The Day I Stood Still (National) Never Land (Ambassadors) Terms of Abuse (Hampstead)
In a prison of guilt
Sheridan Morley
Three or four years ago, the reputation of Kevin Elyot was established almost overnight by his My Night With Reg, a thoughtful and infinitely touching gay play in which most of the events that mattered happened offstage, while on stage we watched their effect on a group of closely interlinked characters. On the National's Cottesloe stage we now have Elyot's The Day I Stood Still, which also plays around with the conventions of stagecraft, though now more in the tradition of Priestley's Dangerous Corner or Pinter's Betrayal. In that sense, this is a time play, and once again we have at its centre a man unable to connect with life, but equally unable to allow it to pass him by without making the occasional desperate and usually doomed effort to open the doors of his closet.
In this case he is Horace, wonderfully uneasily played by Adrian Scarborough, and we follow him from the early 1980s through to the present day and then back to the Sixties as gay sensibilities change. But he remains chronically closeted in a curiously English prison of guilt and sheer embarrassment at the demands of his heart and body.
The echoes here range from Jules et Jim all the way back to Proust as a long-lost gold chain finally releases the secrets of the past, but in its analysis of the recent rites of gay pride, and of how easy it is to cut off entirely from an ever-changing outside world, The Day I Stood Still is a haunting and haunted story of how in the end people always let you down, sometimes by simply dying at the wrong moment. Elyot's play starts ominously like Art, as an intellectual conversation-piece about nothing very much, but it rapidly develops into an infinitely funnier, bitchier and sadder play about old friends in a time-warp where the world is seen to belong only to those who know precisely where they wish to go in it.
Recollection is reversed, promises are broken, friends are betrayed, but at the last we have here a touching and sometimes traumatic account of how we got from the Swinging Sixties to the Egocentric Eighties and of those who died on that long march. In a very strong cast, Scarborough is expertly partnered by Catherine Russell, Geoffrey Church and Oliver Milburn in Ian Rickson's agile and adept production, one which augurs very well indeed for his new management of the Royal Court.
While that theatre remains in exile, at the Ambassadors it has a curious new play by Phyllis Nagy: Never Land is set in the South of France and concerns two families, one local and desperate to move to Bristol while the other, perfidious English visitors, first patronise and then betray them in a script all too inclined to wander around its own character sketches in search of some central theme.
Pip Donaghy and Sheila Gish do what they can to keep Steven Pimlott's produc- tion on the rails, but the centre cannot hold and in the end we are left with an intrigu- ingly ill-met group each of whom would really rather be some place else. If Never Land is not about Peter Pan's magical island just beyond the second star to the right, it is instead about an all too real world in which fascination turns quickly to repulsion and friendship to disillusion. In many ways, Nagy's new play is a throwback to those family dramas of the 1950s which used to fill the Haymarket with titles like A Day by the Sea or Waters of the Moon, but where they were infinitely better-crafted, Nagy seems happy to let our attention wan- der around the Menton set watching each character in turn but never being able to care for or about any one of them. Like The Day I Stood Still, this, too, is a play about the failure of people to connect, but where Elyot manages the mood of a social documentary, Nagy is content with a rather hazily water-coloured landscape of the British abroad.
And finally at Hampstead, Jessica Townsend's Terms of Abuse launches a sea- son of new playwriting with a chilly echo of the Fred West murder trials written by a first-time playwright who grew up a few streets away from that terrible Gloucester house. But this is in no sense a reconstruc- tion of the case, even though the themes of child abuse and rape are central; rather, it is about the ethics of selling such stories to gutter journalism, a short, sharp shock of a play which ends all too abruptly but sug- gests a raw new talent. All the characters in Terms of Abuse live with a curious kind of internal guilt, and they are all familiar: the abused child, the gutter journalist, the dodgy policeman, each of whom discovers in themselves something they would rather have left as well concealed as West's multiple murders. But Julie-Anne Robinson's production never quite manages to hold it all together, despite powerful performances from Suzan Sylvester and Dermot Crowley; what might have made for a highly dramatic 50 min- utes on television seems sprawling even as a short evening in the theatre.
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