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A slight, only fitfully affecting swansong - Twilight Song, Park Theatre, review

Paul Higgins in Twilight Song at Park Theatre, London - © Robert Workman
Paul Higgins in Twilight Song at Park Theatre, London - © Robert Workman

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 in 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, it proves a slight, only fitfully affecting swansong that usefully bulks up his back-catalogue without adding much value to his stock.

Bryony Hannah in Twilight Song - Credit: Robert Workman
Bryony Hannah in Twilight Song Credit: Robert Workman

In its title, Twilight Song inevitably recalls one of Noël Coward’s final plays, the two-act 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 personal 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).

Starting in the here and now (then rewinding), the play’s 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 séance) 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.

Adam Garcia and Paul Higgins in Twilight Song - Credit: Robert Workman
Adam Garcia and Paul Higgins in Twilight Song Credit: Robert Workman

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 the latter’s 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 séance) her second, cuckoo-in-the-nest offspring. The lighting darkens as this monster matriarch (an allusion to Hitchcock’s Psycho is crowbarred in early on) 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

London theatre: the best plays and shows on now
London theatre: the best plays and shows on now