A Tale of the Final Betrayal

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 center 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 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 that augurs very well indeed for his new management of the Royal Court.