Gay plays crowd the theatrical canon. There are the necessary enigmas of Noël Coward, like The Vortex or Design For Living, which are slyly aimed at an audience of knowing code-breakers. There are the proud, defiant (and rather tedious) pleas for understanding like La Cage Aux Folles. And the gayest of them all, My Night With Reg, is also the least overtly gay because it dispenses with all homosexual caricatures. There isn’t an interior designer, a flight steward or a hair stylist in sight, let alone a Liberace fetishist, or a Maria Callas wonk.
The characters are mainstream yuppies who are exactly like hetero folk, except that they seduce one another with very little encouragement and an enviably high success rate. We’re in the 1980s. Aids, represented by the shadowy and unseen Reg, haunts the action. The characters are university chums who meet up ten years after graduation and slowly realise that most, and perhaps all, of the group have embraced a joyful tryst with Reg and his lethal body fluids.
Writer Kevin Elyot arranges an ingenious tapestry of affairs, crushes and unrequited ardours in a script that operates on several levels. It’s a flatshare comedy crammed with engaging figures of fun. Petty, nit-picking Bernie tolerates the affairs of his randy thuggish boyfriend because he’s terrified of getting the elbow. Cool, suave John is adored by Guy, the chubby loser, who can’t find the courage to declare his love. The flat he owns is being decorated by a fit young Brummie named Eric whom all the older men covet madly, but he barely notices as they drool and pant and ogle. Comedy aside, there’s a whole heap of suspense here. It’s like a country-house thriller. Anyone could croak at any time, and even the near-celibate Guy is at risk thanks to an unprotected summertime fling.
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