My Night With Reg review – fine revival for caustic study of gay manners

Back in 1994, Kevin Elyot's My Night With Reg was something of a breakthrough: the first British gay play to win a wide West End audience. Seen today, it stands up extremely well, both as a caustic study of gay manners in the age of Aids and as a piece that shows that Elyot had the capacity to combine clever theatrical carpentry with emotional honesty.

The pivotal figure is Guy, a dogged loner whose cautious attitude to sex leads one character to observe, "You know he masturbates in Marigolds." In the first scene, celebrating Guy's flat-warming, we not only learn that he has long had an unspoken love for his old university chum, John: we also discover that the rootless John has been having a secret affair with Reg, the lover of another old mate from uni days, the flamboyant Daniel. But, in the two succeeding scenes, we find that the unseen Reg has been generous with his favours and has slept with just about everyone in Guy's circle of gay friends. It is significant that John and Reg have been spotted going to see a fashionable French film, since I suspect Elyot's play is an oblique homage to Eric Rohmer's My Night With Maud.

Even if the chat is less philosophical than in Rohmer's movie, Elyot's characters reveal a similar capacity for deception and self-deception. No relationship, it turns out, has been safe from the randy Reg. But Elyot's great gift is for depicting, in a way applicable to people of all sexual persuasions, the wounds and hurts of love. One scene, where the tongue-tied Guy fails to declare his passion for John, echoes a similar passage in The Cherry Orchard. And the play's most tragic figure is John, a once-golden youth, who drifts through life in a cloud of irresponsibility.

Played straight through at 110 minutes, Robert Hastie's production catches the secret fears and surface buoyancy of this group of companions and gets fine performances all round. Jonathan Broadbent is very good as the solitary Guy, a man who once helped stage The Bacchae, but who has never learned to surrender to Dionysiac passion. Julian Ovenden as the sadly unfulfilled John, Geoffrey Streatfeild as the extravagantly Wildean Daniel and Richard Cant and Matt Bardock as a mismatched, quasi-marital couple make an equally strong impact. And even if the character of a young Birmingham boy, nicely played by Lewis Reeves, has a touch of wish-fulfilment, the play revives well as a deceptive boulevard comedy haunted by death.

Until 27 September. Box office: 0844 871 7624. Venue: Donmar Warehouse, London.