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The other new work by a well-known playwright, Simon Gray's Cell Mates, is a disappointment. Although based on the real-life case of convicted British spy George Blake, who was sprung from prison in 1966 by a small-time ex-con whom he had befriended inside, the piece is strained and unconvincing (as usual, facts are no guarantee of dramatic plausibility). In a kgb-monitored Moscow flat, Blake and his pal Sean Bourke (Rik Mayall) grapple psychologically through stages of need, dependence, emotional freedom and deception, while apparently vying to be the first to finish the memoirs they keep dashing into their rooms to dictate into tape machines.
For dramatic impact, nothing in the script compares with an exit by one of the leading actors-from the play and from England. Stephen Fry, a popular TV and revue performer and best-selling comic novelist, had been cast in an unaccustomed serious role as Blake. The reviews were harsh, and two days later Fry disappeared. For a week the missing star shared the headlines with wanted futures trader Nicholas Leeson, while understudy Mark Anderson gamely played to sparse houses until Simon Ward could take over the role. Finally Fry sent a fax from Belgium, accepting the critics' verdict that his acting was "inadequate," pleading "cowardice, embarrassment and distress," and saying he intended to "rethink my life." What really needed rethinking, though, was the play, which will close next week.
The only headlines actor-playwright Kevin Elyot has had to worry about are those hyping his still emergent career. Elyot's My Night with Reg began at the Royal Court Theatre's experimental upstairs stage, transferred directly to the West End and won the Evening Standard award as the best comedy of 1994. Reg is the transatlantic equivalent of McNally's Love! In the outlines of both works, we can see a distinct subgenre forming: the gay ensemble soap. A group of homosexual men, aids-haunted, gather periodically in the home of one of them, where they banter, bicker, shift alliances and bare their souls (and too often their bodies), occasionally mourning a recent death, and all the while striving to smile gallantly through their fears and loneliness. It's a highly effective vehicle for melodrama, and of course it's grounded in a somber reality--but therein lies the danger. The form relies on the audience's providing reserves of sympathy and ready-made emotion, which are not always earned.
In Reg we never meet the title character, who dies offstage fairly early on. And who has had a night with him? As it turns out, virtually everybody in the cast of characters, unbeknown to his live-in lover. Even the vicar at Reg's funeral remarks afterward how good he was in bed. The successive revelations add up to a La Ronde of betrayal, giving a baleful bite to the play's extravagant humor. In an excellent cast, David Bamber is the poor, fussy, spinsterish host who must endure everyone else's blurted confessions of getting it on with Reg, and John Sessions gives a performance of self-devouring intensity as Reg's Rabelaisian but ultimately devastated lover.