Kevin Elyot’s Archive and Mouth to Mouth (2001) by Samuel Adamson

As a writer-in-residence at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, I’ve spent time researching the papers of the playwright and screenwriter Kevin Elyot (1951-2014).  Here is my fifth article in response to Elyot’s archive, in which I discuss his fourth play Mouth to Mouth.  A general reflection on Elyot is here. I’ve also written about Coming Clean (1982), My Night with Reg (1994), and The Day I Stood Still (1998).

My year with Kev: moral questions

Two moral questions arose for me during my time in the playwright Kevin Elyot’s archive as the recipient of the 2023 Kevin Elyot Award.

My stated aim to the award’s panel was to write about Elyot – but I’m a playwright, not a biographer, and the first question was, simply, is this right?

Elyot was guarded about himself in interviews, and, as his agent Sebastian Born told me, did not share early ideas or drafts with others:

Kevin’s plays always arrived fully formed. He was superstitious about saying anything about what he was working on, so every once in a while I would receive a brown envelope containing his latest play. Such a thrill for an agent.1

Not unexpectedly, the archive reveals things Elyot withheld from journalists, as well as the hard work – pages of notes, multiple drafts – behind those ‘fully formed’ plays. With his notebooks, letters, research materials, press cuttings, and photographs, I was privy to some of Elyot’s innermost fears, tastes, resentments, pains, joys – and some of his personal opinions on friends and collaborators.

I was able to quell my unease about this strange intimacy with Elyot fairly quickly. I assumed that had he not wanted people to make discoveries about his life and practice, he’d have destroyed his papers. Besides, the yearly award – funded by an endowment given to the University of Bristol by members of Elyot’s family – exists to inspire writers in their own practice. It asks them to consider not only Elyot’s published and produced work, but the life and work behind that work. The materials are there to be read, and I began to understand the award as an act of artistic serial reciprocity, a tip of Elyot’s cap to succeeding generations.

The second moral question was how relevant are Elyot’s papers to my understanding of his performed and published work?

It’s obvious that Elyot drew from personal experience to write his plays, and there’s a lot in his notes about what he intended the plays to do. So it’s tempting to disregard the biographical and intentional fallacies – those (in my view) sound and helpful twentieth-century critical theories – and read the work via the life. Elyot argued in a column in The Telegraph in 2001 that if art reflects the artist, ‘this is only part of the story,’ yet at the same admitted,

Whether a play is about a schoolboy love affair or a satire on the power of the multinationals, it will only work if the writer taps an emotional core and thus, to some degree, reveals himself.2

The central character in Elyot’s fourth original play Mouth to Mouth is a playwright called Frank. When asked by the journalist Heather Neill at the time of the play’s premiere in 2001, ‘does Frank equal Kevin?’, Elyot could not quite deny it:

That’s a difficult one. Everything I write is a bit autobiographical, but I’m in all the characters.3

His piercingly honest, funny, moving and often troubling plays simply have the feel of being personal.

In the end, I decided to make myself comfortable on the fence. Sometimes Elyot’s papers elucidate the work, but the work stands on its own. On the one hand, I prefer to look at texts as texts – on the other, these articles are the reflections of a playwright, not academic research papers, so I don’t have to take any notice of the biographical and intentional fallacies.

All I’ve been able to do, as someone who admires Elyot’s writing, is reread his published plays, immerse myself in his papers, and call it as I see it.

As I see it, his archive reveals two key things about Elyot.

‘The usual’: undisclosed emotion, frustrated desire

The first is that his notes are not dissimilar from his six original plays, in that there is a steady repetition of ideas. As I’ve written elsewhere, Elyot was a hedgehog of a playwright, a Proustian obsessed with the same themes: the recovery of the past, repressed desire, the Forsterian need to connect, music, betrayal, guilt, mortality. In an early notebook for The Day I Stood Still, he wrote:

A tragedy interrupted by life’s vulgar comedy.

Show inhumanity bleeding.

Painful.

Undisclosed emotion.

Frustrated desire.

The usual!4

Because he was preoccupied with ‘the usual,’ his projects intersected, and some notebooks resist the archivist’s ex post facto categorisation. Elyot’s method, in his own words at the time of Mouth to Mouth, was ‘to make lots of notes over a long period. Hopefully something emerges that I can fashion into a play.’5 He discussed this process more expansively with Harriet Devine in 2005:

DEVINE:  […] how does it happen that an idea for a play comes along? Is it always the same process? Does something happen that sparks it off?

ELYOT:  It might be a moment that intrigues me, or – it can start off in the oddest way. And really it makes me sound a bit capricious and maybe rather shallow because, while some playwrights might sit down to write a play about Guantanamo, or the Health Service, I tend to write a play because I want to see two people doing a tango, or want to hear a piece of music in juxtaposition to something else. And then gradually you put pieces together over a length of time, and shape something out of it.6

Elyot’s reworking of the same themes – not ‘shallow’ themes, yet not overtly political ones – combined with his process of starting with ‘fragments’ (Devine’s word), meant that plays developed concurrently. In a notebook assigned by the Theatre Collection to The Day I Stood Still, he wrote in capitals, ‘WRITE TWO PLAYS!’, and although the play he developed in this book is indeed The Day I Stood Still, many of its ‘fragments’ form the basis for his next play.7 Early on he wrote, ‘Wife: Lindsay’ – a reference to his friend the actor Lindsay Duncan, for whom he created the part of Laura in that play, eventually called Mouth to Mouth.8 A few pages later, he wrote:

THE STORY:

X. falls for son of friends (wife + hubby). Starts rel. underage. So X. is having son. Wife’s having affair.9

Here, Elyot discovered the essential plot of Mouth to Mouth – the secret betrayal by her gay best friend of a wife who has her own secret – as he shaped The Day I Stood Still.

Ticket stub for Mouth to mouth Press night
Press night ticket, West End transfer, University of Bristol Theatre Collection, KE/3/26/5

Vulnerable playwright

The second key thing Elyot’s papers reveal is his self-doubt, an insecurity slightly at odds with the acerbic persona he projected in interviews (and which friends and colleagues have written about since his death) though not necessarily with characters like Guy in My Night with Reg, Horace in The Day I Stood Still and Frank in Mouth to Mouth, who all struggle with diffidence, and whose unexpressed secrets fuel the plays’ plots.10

Elyot was, I think, self-conscious about ‘the usual,’ aware that to plough the same territory over and over was to risk not discovering new story treasures, and to risk being criticised for repeating himself.

In a Day I Stood Still notebook he wrote, ‘Squash all opposition with some big, assured laughs + bold dramatic strokes’ – his apprehension about ‘opposition’ is revealing.11

A galvanising message to himself in a Mouth to Mouth notebook is wise, and inspiring to anyone who reads it. But there is a poignancy to it; in my view, only a vulnerable artist could have written it:

FORGET FASHION, what’s expected, comedy per se, rivals – WRITE what’s true, what’s true to you, ignore EVERYBODY, write a TRAGEDY, reach for the truth of life, aim high, write a masterpiece. Amaze + surprise them.12

Mouth to Mouth: a moral question

Wonderfully, Elyot, a gay, HIV-positive playwright, a waspish and quick-witted Proustian who was nevertheless insecure about his writing and worried about repeating himself, harnessed his insecurity and experience of chronic illness to write a masterpiece about – I want to groan, and yet! – a gay, witty, insecure, HIV-positive and Proustian playwright, who, suffering from writer’s block, laments to Laura (his best friend, that ‘Wife’ in the The Day I Stood Still notebook) that he is ‘always being accused of writing about the same thing.’13

I suggest that any blocked and/or insecure writer reading this should refrain from taking heart from it: surely no one should write dramas about not being able to write. Yet somehow, with Mouth to Mouth, Elyot produced a stylish, droll and deeply disturbing meditation on a moral question: should writers draw from real life? Can they, if it involves betrayal of loved ones? Can writing only ever be a sharp practice?

The play has a palindromic structure and begins with a scene in which we glean that something terrible has happened – ‘unimaginably tragic’ as Frank says later – and that Frank has things he needs to confess to Laura.14 We flash back, then forward, to discover what these things are – and that everyone, not just Frank, has his or her own guilts and secrets.

In the final scene we return, according to a palindrome, to the first scene, and climactically get the answer to the question we have seen Frank grappling with throughout: should I use my life, the things that have happened to me and that I have made happen, to create my art?

In one reading, the answer is no: Frank will not plunder his life, and will not exacerbate the trauma of his best friend Laura, whose son, we now know, has died in a dreadful accident.

But human beings are complex creatures, and though he says he wants to, Frank never confesses his secrets/sins to Laura, perhaps in part because without her knowledge he discovers the secret of her affair. Typically for Elyot, there is more than one reading.

For a late draft of My Night with Reg, Elyot used two epigraphs: a passage from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s posthumous novel The Leopard, which survived into Reg’s published edition; and a passage from Patrick White’s 1976 novel A Fringe of Leaves:

‘… Would you not say that life is a series of blunders rather than any clear design, from which we may come out whole if we are lucky?’15

Elyot dropped the White from Reg’s rehearsal draft onwards, but it was a very interesting idea, because the play and all of Elyot’s subsequent plays including Mouth to Mouth are scrupulously well-designed, yet peopled by characters blundering through life, barely coming out whole. The design of art can (should?) be elegant, but, first-rate playwright that he was, Elyot was utterly fearless when it came to the messy ‘truth of life’ for the characters inside his design – Truth as Hilary Mantel sees it in her memoir Giving Up the Ghost:

Truth isn’t pretty […] and the pursuit of it doesn’t make pretty people. Truth isn’t elegant; that’s just mathematicians’ sentimentality. Truth is squalid and full of blots, and you can only find it in the accumulation of dusty and broken facts, in the cellars and sewers of the human mind.16

Mouth to Mouth’s epigraph is from the final volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time:

The whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer.17

and this lesson becomes a lifeline for the dying playwright Frank, who’s known, if he’s known at all, for a play about Proust called ‘A Piece of Cake’:

What happened [to Laura’s son] – was just awful – unimaginably tragic. It’s haunted me for a year. And the point is – I think it’d make quite a good play. You see, I’m coming round to the opinion that I have to use whatever’s thrown at me.18

Showing how it goes

Elyot was not Frank. As he said to Neill, ‘I’m in all the characters,’ and as he said to Mireia Aragay and Pilar Zozaya, playwriting is about making things up:

I don’t lead a life full enough to be able to write several plays about. I don’t do that much, and my daily routine is pretty boring, so I can’t be writing about that. It would be very dull to sit in a theatre watching it unfold. The key is to try and enter the world of the imagination.19

Yet the anxieties Elyot expressed in his notebooks about repeating himself with ‘the usual’ and running out of ideas, and even the point he made to Aragay and Zozaya about his uninteresting life, turn up in Mouth to Mouth:

FRANK: I’m finding it [writing] pretty difficult, to be honest. I can’t put my finger on why exactly –

LAURA: No ideas.

FRANK: That could be it. But no, I’m having quite a hard time. I’m always being accused of writing about the same thing.

LAURA: And what would that be?

FRANK: Well, me, as it happens, which simply isn’t true. They say it’s a sign of creative bankruptcy.

LAURA: I’d have thought personal experience was the only thing worth writing about.

FRANK: But my life isn’t that interesting, and if it were, I wouldn’t have the time to write about it.

LAURA: Oh, I do wish tonight weren’t happening!

FRANK: Yes, well … Nice olives.20

In a lesser writer’s hands, these writerly anxieties might bore or irritate, seem like so much authorial moaning. But Frank is more complex than he appears – and I love how, as in Chekhov, his complexity is conveyed partly by the hilarious indifference with which he is treated by others. The exchange ‘Oh, I do wish tonight weren’t happening’ and ‘Yes, well … Nice olives’ is typical: we know there’s a world of torment and doubt inside Frank because Laura doesn’t really care and Frank must turn to the subject of olives.

All of Elyot’s dialogue is like this: crisp, funny and, most importantly, full of subtext. It is never self-righteous, but it demands its audience interrogate knotty moral questions and not-pretty truths about human beings:

We lie.

We are duplicitous.

And the artists among us are impelled by nature to use whatever treasures they find in their territory to create their art.

‘I wouldn’t dream of preaching,’ Elyot said, ‘I just show how it goes.’21


This work was inspired and developed through the generous support of the Kevin Elyot Award at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.

1 Sebastian Born, email to me, 7 March 2024.
2 Kevin Elyot, ‘Whose life is on stage, anyway?’, Daily Telegraph, 12 May 2001, p. A7, University of Bristol Theatre Collection (UBTC), KE/3/26/5.
3 Elyot to Heather Neill, The Times, 2 February 2001, UBTC, KE/3/26/5.
4 UBTC, KE/3/23/1, Book 1 of 3, p. 36.
5 Elyot to Neill.
6 Elyot to Harriet Devine in Looking Back: Playwrights at the Royal Court 1956-2006 (London: Faber, 2006), p. 111.
7 UBTC, KE/3/23/1, Book 1 of 3, p. 88.
8 UBTC, KE/3/23/1, Book 1 of 3, p. 28.
9 UBTC, KE/3/23/1, Book 1 of 3, p. 34.
10 See, for example, Roger Michell and Robert Hastie in ‘Remembering Kevin,’ Introduction to My Night with Reg (London: Nick Hern Books, 1994, repr. 2013), pp. 8-10.
11 UBTC, KE/3/21/1, Book 1 of 3, p. 42.
12 UBTC, KE/3/26/1, Book 2 of 3, p. 58.
13 Elyot, Mouth to Mouth (London: Nick Hern Books, 2001), p. 20.
14 Ibid, p. 52.
15 UBTC, KE/3/19/2, Book 3 of 3 (My Night with Reg 31/3/94 draft).
16 Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost: a Memoir (London: Fourth Estate, 2003; repr. 2013), p. 151.
17 Elyot, Mouth to Mouth, p. 5.
18 Ibid, pp. 27, 52. Elyot wrote a short ‘extract from “A Piece of Cake”’ in a notebook. Brilliantly, Proust does not get his memory-triggering madeleine, because a Young Man, replacing the indisposed waitress Clotilde (who ‘thinks she ate a suspect prawn for luncheon’), remembers his rosehip infusion but not his cake. When Proust realises the Young Man is English, he declares, ‘I suspect there is more to this than meets the eye,’ and the extract finishes. UBTC, KE/3/26/1, Book 3 of 3, pp. 3-4.
19 Elyot to Mireia Aragay and Pilar Zozaya, in British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics, ed. by Aragay, Hildegard Klein, Enric Monforte, Zozaya (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 70.
20 Elyot, Mouth to Mouth, pp. 20-1.
21 Elyot to Carole Woddis, ‘An afternoon with Kevin’, Capital Gay, 22 April 1994, p. 16, UBTC, KE/3/19/7, 5 of 5.

On Kevin Elyot and My Night with Reg by Samuel Adamson

Samuel Adamson is the current recipient of the Kevin Elyot Award, an annual award given to support a writer-in-residence at the Theatre Collection. It is given in memory of the renowned playwright, screenwriter and Bristol Drama alumnus, Kevin Elyot (1951-2014) and the influence he has had on writing and the Arts. The award has been generously funded by an endowment given to the University by members of Kevin’s family.  The endowment was gifted along with the Kevin Elyot Archive, which is held at the Theatre Collection, and comprises scripts, correspondence, manuscripts and publicity material detailing Elyot’s working process from initial idea to finished product.

One summer’s day in 1995, I met my agent Sebastian Born for the first time. After our meeting in his office in London’s Holland Park, he joined me on my walk to the Underground and on the way told me something about his client Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg. This play – which had premiered to huge acclaim at the Royal Court Theatre in March 1994, was still doing great business in the West End, was in development as a film for the BBC, and was attracting interest from around the world – had been rejected by Hampstead, the new-writing theatre that had commissioned it.

Sebastian is a phlegmatic man, and over the years I’ve interpreted his story as a lesson to me, the smug young playwright who’d just secured an agent. The theatre is fickle. Some people will like your work, some won’t. Nobody knows anything. Be philosophical about the inevitable disappointments if you can.

Still, there was a faint trace of ‘sucks to Hampstead’ in Sebastian’s tone that at the time I relished as I’d seen My Night with Reg three times and considered it a work of genius.

A handbill advertising the play 'My Night with Reg' by Kevin Elyot
Handbill for Royal Court Theatre premiere, 1994. (University of Bristol Theatre Collection, KE/3/19/3)

My memories of Roger Michell’s original production are vivid. It starred David Bamber, Anthony Calf and John Sessions as Guy, John and Daniel, old university friends and gay men living in the shadow of Aids. I remember Bamber’s perfectly timed delivery of the play’s first double entendre: ‘I was just stiffening some egg whites.’ I remember the friends roguishly raising their glasses to ‘sodomy’. And I remember, after Aids had killed both the title character and Guy, the terror behind Daniel’s line to John, ‘I’m suddenly very tired,’ and John’s deceptively simple response, which, from Anthony Calf, was in fact a primal scream: ‘I’m pretty tired, too.’

I also remember my excitement as I realised that Reg, Daniel’s boyfriend – who like Samuel Beckett’s Godot never appears – has slept with every character except Guy, the self-conscious single man at whose flat-warming the story begins. Whether Reg has passed on HIV to the others is ambiguous. What is unambiguous is that Guy, who harbours a secret love for John and barely sleeps with anyone, contracts HIV after being raped in Lanzarote by ‘a mortician from Swindon.’ In one of the play’s deftest structural conceits, the character who does not have a night with Reg is the only character who dies.

As the 2023 recipient of the Kevin Elyot Award, given annually to support a writer-in-residence at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection where Elyot’s papers are housed, I’ve learned that Elyot was proud of this superior craftsmanship. ‘[T]he STRUCTURE is a COUP!’ he wrote in one notebook – and the play does indeed have two coups de théâtre when time jumps forward and Guy’s flat-warming becomes a wake: first for Reg, then for Guy himself.[i] Elyot storms his comedy of manners with tragedy, and it is surprising, thrilling and heartbreaking. Reg is a funny play about serious things: the randomness of disease, the necessity of lies, the pain of unrequited love – and the cruel threat to gay men’s sexual freedom after the liberations of the 1970s (the subject of Elyot’s first play, Coming Clean, which premiered in 1982, just before the Aids crisis).

Two front covers of playscript 'My Night with Reg' by Kevin Elyot
Play scripts published by Nick Hern Books to coincide with the play’s West End transfer in November 1994 (L), and with its twentieth-anniversary Donmar Warehouse revival in July 2014 (R)

In 2004, Sebastian Born retired from agenting, and at his farewell party at a bar in the Portobello Road, I noticed Elyot. I wanted to approach him and say how much I admired Reg, as well as Coming Clean and the two other plays I’d seen in their original productions, The Day I Stood Still (National Theatre, 1998) and Mouth to Mouth (Royal Court, 2001). I wanted to say how much I was looking forward to his new play Forty Winks, due to open at the Royal Court that October. I wanted to say I was looking forward to many more plays.

Unfortunately, like Guy in Reg, I was too self-conscious to act on my desires – though I went to Forty Winks, which, sadly, was the last of Elyot’s plays to be produced in his lifetime (he died in 2014 at the age of 62; his sixth play Twilight Song premiered posthumously in 2017). Forty Winks is a troubling piece, inspired by the Don Juan legend and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s extraordinary 1968 film Theorem. Although these references are explicit in the text, most critics missed them, and felt that Elyot was repeating himself. It was his least successful play.

Handbill for 'My Night with Reg'
Handbill for West End transfer with original Royal Court cast, November 1994. L to R: Kenneth MacDonald (Benny), Roger Frost (Bernie), David Bamber (Guy), John Sessions (Daniel), Anthony Calf (John), Joe Duttine (Eric) – yes, the allusions to Elton John (and Éric Rohmer) are deliberate. (UBTC, KE/3/19/3)

If Isaiah Berlin is right that writers are either foxes who range over a large landscape, or hedgehogs who stay close to home, then Elyot, like his hero Proust, was a hedgehog. In the last ten years of his life, he adapted nine Agatha Christie novels for ITV and Christopher Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind for the BBC – all to considerable acclaim. But it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that he was hurt by the failure of Forty Winks, and by the critical insinuation that he lacked the ambition of a fox. His papers are full of reminders to disregard critics, and one is striking: ‘FORGET fashion, what’s expected, comedy per se, rivals – WRITE what’s true, what’s true to you, ignore EVERYBODY, write a TRAGEDY, reach for the truth of life, aim high, write a masterpiece. Amaze + surprise them.’[ii]

I think Elyot wrote three masterpieces: My Night with Reg, The Day I Stood Still and Mouth to Mouth. Yes, they plough the same territory over and over: loneliness, friendship, music, memory, the passing of youth, betrayal, guilt, mortality, time. But these are the truths of life, and I can’t think of a writer I admire who, in the search for ultimate meaning, does not write about them.

At the Royal Court’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations, Roger Michell said of Reg that it arrived on his desk ‘almost perfectly formed: I cannot remember a single significant change that we made either during preparation or rehearsal. It is that odd thing, a most beautifully crafted and constructed modern play…’[iii]

Elyot’s papers reveal the sweat behind that perfection. He began the play as a sequel to Coming Clean, and it took him over a decade to let that idea fall away and find something new – a decade during which Aids changed everything for gay men, including Elyot, who told Gay Times in 1998, ‘One of the starting points for writing Reg was personal experience. I’ve suffered in similar ways to other gay men of my generation, experienced the same grief, loss and trauma.’[iv] He wrote many drafts, and my reading of the relevant correspondence is that Hampstead Theatre’s rejection of the play had a lot to do with ‘draft bog’ – that indissoluble problem in new writing. For a playwright, old drafts are discarded clay on the floor. But some early readers, even if they are the playwright’s champions, find their feet stuck in the bog.

Thankfully, Roger Michell and the Royal Court saw My Night with Reg as it stood before them, sculpted to perfection. 2024 is the play’s thirtieth anniversary, and the tenth anniversary of Elyot’s death. I hope it brings a revival of at least one of his six exquisite plays.

Headshot of Kevin Elyot leaning on elbow with hand held next to face
Kevin Elyot in 2007. Image credit: Phil Fisk

[i] University of Bristol Theatre Collection, KE/3/19/1, Book 1 of 6, p. 105.

[ii] UBTC, KE/3/26/1, Book 2 of 3, p. 58.

[iii] Roger Michell, in programme for Royal Court Theatre ‘Look Back: 50 Readings, 50 Writers, 50 Years’, My Night with Reg, 9 March 2006, UBTC, KE/3/19/11 (2 of 2).

[iv] Kevin Elyot to James Cary Parkes, ‘A comedy of terrors’, Gay Times, January 1998, pp. 16-17 (p. 17), UBTC, KE/3/23/5.