Kevin Elyot obit

Kevin Elyot obituary

This article is more than 12 years old

Television scriptwriter and playwright who made his name with the smash hit tragicomedy My Night With Reg

 He was not on the list.

The playwright Kevin Elyot, who has died aged 62 after a long illness, is best remembered for his brilliantly written and imaginatively structured tragicomedy My Night With Reg (1994). It is often claimed as a "gay play", but although Elyot wrote often about gay relationships, his real subject was the longing for love and remembrance of loves lost.

In writing about the human heart and the art of living – which Proust defined as "making use of the individuals through whom we suffer" – Elyot transcended categorisation and produced a small body of stage plays that will reward revival, and not just as period pieces. He approved the aphorism of another of his heroes, Nabokov, in saying that there was no such thing as a great idea; style and form are what matters. And his stage plays are striking in that regard. My Night with Reg is composed in three movements, each one divided by a period of time and death. In The Day I Stood Still (1998) the time hops forward from 1984 to the present, and then right back to 1968 in its emotional turmoil.

Elyot was first an actor, appearing with the pioneering group Gay Sweatshop, and in London at the Bush theatre and the King's Head; second a playwright; and third a television screenplay writer not above scripting the Agatha Christie stories of both Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot over the past 10 years.

He was born and raised in the Birmingham suburb of Handsworth, where he was a prominent member of the choir in the Anglo-Catholic church of St Peter's; he sang in the third performance of Britten's War Requiem, in Birmingham town hall, and studied the piano. In 1961, his father, Kenneth Lee, took him and his sister to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Christopher Plummer and Eric Porter in Richard III, and he was hooked; he travelled back frequently on his own on the top deck of the number 150 bus and queued for standing places for as many shows as he could see.

He was educated at King Edward's school, Birmingham (whose alumni include the critic Kenneth Tynan and the playwright David Rudkin), where he started to act, and played Desdemona. He naturally progressed to take a theatre studies degree at Bristol University, graduating in 1973.

It was his association as an actor with the tiny Bush that led to his writing a play for them, Coming Clean, in 1982, directed by David Hayman. It was an elegiac play about sexual relationships at a time when Aids was still a barely credible rumour in Britain, but there was a sense of foreboding in the final scene. He was promptly taken up by the fearsome agent Peggy Ramsay, whose deflating comment on his second (unproduced) play was: "If you are going to write like this, dear, you should take up a hobby, like squash."

He persisted but was always a slow worker, a radio play, According to Plan, surfacing eventually in 1987, then an adaptation of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone for the Worcester Swan in 1990 (a TV version came in 1997), followed by a smart and spikey adaptation of Alexander Ostrovsky's Artists and Admirers for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1992.

My Night With Reg was commissioned by Hampstead theatre, passed on, and taken up smartly by Stephen Daldry, newly appointed artistic director at the Royal Court, who engaged Roger Michell to direct a wonderful cast led by David Bamber, John Sessions and Anthony Calf in a black-laced comedy of gay affections in the wake (literally) of the titular Reg, who had loved, or at least lain with, them all.

The show was a smash hit in the Theatre Upstairs, transferred to the Criterion in the West End (Hugh Bonneville succeeding Sessions) and then the Playhouse. Elyot's name was made. Reg has been produced in countries all over the world and is returning for the first time to London next month in a revival at the Donmar Warehouse.

Elyot's next two stage plays, The Day I Stood Still at the National Theatre, and Mouth to Mouth (2001) in the West End, were both directed by Ian Rickson. Again, an intense personal experience comes off these plays, the first expressing, said one critic, "the dull longings of the terminally unattractive in a world of sexual plenitude", while the second was a testament to teenage aspirations, played out in a reversal of the Oedipus story by a lustlorn cast led by Lindsay Duncan and Michael Maloney.

Forty Winks (2004) at the Royal Court, directed by Katie Mitchell and featuring an unknown Carey Mulligan as a narcoleptic teenager, was another compelling autopsy on love and growing up, with a symbolic reference to Pasolini's Teorema, a movie in which a mysterious stranger picks off sexually each member of the family one by one. His last stage play was a rather campy, sheeny new look at Christie's And Then There Were None in 2005 at the Gielgud, directed by Steven Pimlott, and starring Gemma Jones and Tara Fitzgerald.

Elyot's attempts to "jazz up" Christie, and treat her anachronistically, had mixed results. But audiences loved the television Christie work. Over these past 10 years, there had been a parallel stream of hard-hitting documentary-style dramas, including a fantastically enjoyable account of the chaotic first night in Paris of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, Riot at the Rite (2005); an adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's tragedy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (2005); and Clapham Junction (2007), charting 36 hours in the lives of gay men in south London, a cat's cradle of interconnected stories of civil partnership, homophobic murder and paedophilia.

Elyot had endured poor health for 20 years, since contracting pneumonia on holiday in Italy. In these circumstances, his work rate was heroic, and he was always a good-natured neighbour in Hampstead, north London, as he shuffled between his home and the Royal Free hospital.

He is survived by his sister, Pauline, and his mother.

 Kevin Elyot (Kevin Lee), actor and playwright, born 18 July 1951; died 7 June 2014

 

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