Mouth to Mouth ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(L to R) : Lindsay Duncan, Michael Maloney, Adam Godley, Andrew McKay

Production photography by Ivan Kyncl

Direction: Ian Rickson. Design: Mark Thompson. Lighting: Hugh Vanstone. Sound: Paul Arditti. Music: Stephen Warbeck. Movement: Quinny Sacks.

Cast : Lindsay Duncan, Adam Godley, Barnaby Kay, Michael Maloney, Andrew McKay, Lucy Whybrow, Peter Wight.

“‘I’m having quite a hard time. I’m always being accused of writing the same thing,’ declares Frank, the 40-something dramatist in Mouth to Mouth. This has the air of an in-joke, for the author Kevin Elyot has also found himself charged with writing the same play over and over again.

“Premiered now in Ian Rickson’s beautifully modulated production at the Royal Court …. Mouth to Mouth offers a further demonstration of the sharp, observant humour and sensitivity with which Elyot plays tragicomic variations on these elements.

“The play is a palindrome around a long central flashback which ends in a tagic accident that has left several people felling racked with guilt. On either side of this, we see Michael Maloney’s intense, watchful playwright, who has decided to give up taking his anti-Aids drugs, failing to communicate the cause ofh is own remorse. His attempts to unbosom himself to his gay doctor friends (a flamboyantly bitter Adam Godly) are foiled by the latter’s running monologue which manages to incorporate an angry despair at his partner’s death and a bitchy alertness about the clebrity clientele and the sexual availability of the staff, one of whom, he airly declares, will “let you snort a line off his stiffy in the lav”.

“But internal inhibition stops Frank coming clean with Lindsay Duncan’s Laura about his true relationship to her dead son. Duncan is superb both as the stricken, stammering creature, armoured behind dark glasses in the present-day episodes, and as t eh smoulderlingly frustrated housewife, jealous of her boy’s budding sex life in an expertly orchestrated sticky family gathering.”

THE INDEPENDENT

“Balham, gateway to the south,” cried Peter Sellers in a famous spoolf travelogue. In Kevin Elyot’s haunting new play the same suburb offers a portal to Proust. For, while the piece is set mainly in south London, it touches on the classic Proustian themes of time, memory, loss and guilt in a consciously allusive manner.

“Inevitably there are also echoes of Elyot’s own most recent plays. My Night With Reg and the ay I Stood Still. His hero, Frank is a gay playwright suffering a wasting illness, implicitly sexual and haunted by guilt over some past action. That much is clear from Frank’s funny restaurant encounter with his coke-snorting doctor who bemoans life’s cruelty while avidly spotting celebrities. We than flash back in time to a get-together with Frank and his surrogate Balham family to learn the source of his shame.

“It would be cruel to reveal the plot’s mainspring. What strikes me is the way Elyot, like Frank, observes bourgeois rituals with a mixture of mordant satire and outsiderish envy. Frank’s vest friend Laura, is married to a dullish dentist and dotes obsessively on her 15-year-old son, Phillip: there is even something Proustian about the husband’s loneliness in the face of such fierce passion and about Frank’s own feelings for Phillip. The ache of unsatisfied longing is, however, combined with acerbic comedy: not least in the savage portrait of Laura’s brother-in-law, a philistine, Proust-hating wine-dealer married to an intense, Beowulf-studying interior designer.

… In fact, this play shows Elyot’s writing has an incremental power: it echoes earlier themes while taking him forward into bourgeois family life. It is also beautifully directed by Ian Rickson.”

THE GUARDIAN

“Deft, funny and sad, this touching new play by the author of My Night With Reg contains a wealth of tragedy within a sunlit meeting in a South London kitchen.”

DAILY MAIL