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Forty Winks

  • opened: 11/3/2004
  • closed: 12/4/2004
  • Royal Court Downstairs
  • Box Office: 020 7565 5100
  • Details: To 4 Dec 2004
  • Summary: Visit theARCHIVE to hear a discussion. In Kevin Elyot’s latest play, Don (Dominic Rowan) pitches up the home of his former school friend Howard and early flame Diana – now married. Don’s affections are now focussed on Diana’s daughter, while he in turn is fancied by Howard’s gay brother. Katie Mitchell directs. In the Guardian, Michael Billington found himself wishing Kevin Elyot would ‘occasionally venture into uncharted territory…Elyot is clearly writing about the destructiveness of unfulfilled passion. But although Anastasia Hille as the nervously aroused Diana, Paul Ready as her angina-affected brother-in-law and Carey Mulligan as her disturbed daughter all give good performances, there is something oddly cryptic about Elyot's portrayal of the family.’ In the Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer was disappointed: Elyot ‘seems to be merely recycling himself rather than arriving at anything new, while the play's brief running time – a mere 65 minutes – depressingly suggests a writer running out of steam. It's not often that you will hear me complain that a play is too short, but this one is. One longs for more detail, more meat, a greater variety of mood.’ That said, he added: ‘Despite these failings, Katie Mitchell directs a beautifully acted, tensely absorbing production that crackles with social unease and dangerous desire.’ Benedict Nightingale in the Times havered around the three star mark: ‘The cast have to work hard both to make all this plausible and to keep faith with a dramatic tone which, as those who recall Elyot’s My Night with Reg and Mouth to Mouth will be unsurprised to learn, is funny as well as dark. I admired the wit of some of the writing, as when Wilson’s embittered, malicious Howard, asked how his marriage is going, comes out with the marvellously ambiguous: “We couldn’t be happier. We’re as happy as we’ll ever be.” But I couldn’t fully believe in Howard’s gay brother, In the Sunday Telegraph, John Gross found ‘Elyot’s approach.. muffled and oblique. Almost everything about the play seems tenuous and elusive. Only the scene where Don yearns for the sleeping Hermia carries a full emotional charge.’ In the Mail on Sunday, Georgina Brown awarded two stars: ‘flashes of the shrewd observation, wit and insight that made My Night with Reg and The Day I Stood Still so exceptional, but it strikes me as a first draft, not a finished piece.’ In the Sunday Independent, Kate Bassett applauded the performances: ‘This darkening drama is shot through with delightful shafts of comic relief. Hille and Rowan are treading a superbly fine line between awkwardness and searching grief, and Paul Ready is also excellent as the chattering, needy Charlie.. However, it must be said that the play is flawed.’ In the Observer, Susannah Clapp mused: ‘Ever since My Night With Reg, people have expected momentous things from Kevin Elyot. That 1994 play, in which a group of gay men faced with Aids looked back on their lives, subtly changed the theatrical ecology, putting on stage a bit of life that hadn't been there before. But though Elyot's subsequent plays have taken up Reg -like themes, they haven't had its resonance. The Day I Stood Still and Mouth to Mouth both played games with time and treated the way in which obsessional love can arrest a life. They were elegantly written, elegiacally expressed and ingeniously structured, but felt like pale reworkings of a basic pattern. The same is true of Forty Winks, but it's not a sleeping pill.’
  • Author: Kevin Elyot
  • Director:
  • Composer:
  • Lyricist: Set Designer: Hildegard Bechtler
  • Lighting Designer: Paul Constable
  • Costume Designer: Iona Kenrick
  • Choreographer:
  • Cast Details: Anastasia Hille (Diana); Stephen Kennedy (Danny); Carey Mulligan (Hermia); Paul Ready (Charlie); Dominic Rowan (Don); Simon Wilson (Howard).