The Day I Stood Still (NHB Modern Plays)

By Kevin Elyot

A poignantly funny drama from the author of My Night With Reg.
In the 60s, Horace, Jerry and Judy were teenagers. They were into drink, drugs, Hendrix, The Hobbit and, of course, each other. Thirty years later, Jerry is dead, Judy is in love and the gay-but-hesitant Horace is unable to get on with his life - until he receives a surprise visitor.
'Even funnier and more touching than Elyot's 'My Night with Reg'... a most appealing play' - The Times
'Elyot once more shows himself capable of transcending the ghettoising definition of the gay play... Through the experience of the lonely, hesitant, life-fearing Horace, he touches poignantly on a universal theme: the way we cling, in desperation to some golden moment in the past as a protection against the uncertain present' - Guardian

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Apr 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781780015903

Kevin Elyot

Born in Birmingham in 1951, and educated there at King Edward's School and then at Bristol University, Kevin Elyot was an actor before becoming a writer. He won the Samuel Beckett Award for his first play, Coming Clean (1982), staged by the Bush Theatre, London. Subsequent stage work includes a version of Ostrovsky's Artists and Admirers (RSC, 1992); My Night with Reg (Royal Court Theatre, 1994), which was hailed as 'a play of genius' by the Daily Mail, won the Evening Standard and Laurence Olivier Awards for Best Comedy and ran for almost a year in the West End; The Day I Stood Still (National Theatre, 1998); Mouth to Mouth (Royal Court, 2001), which also transferred to the West End; and Forty Winks (Royal Court, 2004). Kevin's screenplays include Killing Time (BBC, 1990), which won theWriters' Guild Award for Best TV Play or Film; an adaptation of The Moonstone (BBC, 1996); the film version of My Night with Reg (BBC, 1997); No Night is Too Long (2002), adapted from the novel by Barbara Vine (the pseudonym of Ruth Rendell) for BBC Films/Alliance. He adapted six of Agatha Christie's Marple novels as well as three of her Poirot novels for television, including the series' final episode Curtain. Other screenplays include Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (BBC, 2005), adapted from the novel by Patrick Hamilton; Riot at the Rite (BBC, 2005); Clapham Junction (2007), a film for Darlow Smithson and Channel 4, starring Rupert Graves, Paul Nicholls and Luke Treadaway; and Christopher and His Kind (Mammoth Screen/BBC, 2011), based on Christopher Isherwood's novel, starring Matt Smith, Lindsay Duncan, Imogen Poots and Toby Jones. Kevin died in June 2014, shortly before the Donmar Warehouse revival of My Night with Reg.

Book preview

THE DAY I STOOD STILL

For my father

Kenneth Lee

(1911-1974)

and my godchildren

Rosanna Michell

and

Alice May Wilkinson



And still I return like a line to the centre,

Like fire to the sun and the stream to the sea.

Monteverdi, L’Incoronazione di Poppea

Act 1, Scene i. Libretto: Busenello



The Day I Stood Still was first performed in the Cottesloe auditorium of the National Theatre, London, on 22 January 1998. The cast was as follows:

Director Ian Rickson

Designer Mark Thompson

Lighting Designer Hugh Vanstone

Sound Designer Simon Baker

Composer Stephen Warbeck

Musicians Bernie Lafontaine (clarinet), Graeme Taylor (guitar)



Characters

HORACE

JUDY

GUY

TERENCE

JIMI

JERRY

Setting

The sitting room of an upper-storey apartment in a North London mansion block. There is a small balcony with a railing and outside shutters. The furniture includes a late Georgian dining-chair and a Victorian upright