The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 84

13 Plays old, new, borrowed, blue: Michael Coveney' varied week includes my night with reg and Pinter's landscape sa, Dn a week when 87 playwrights signed a letter demanding a quota system of new work in our subsidised theatres, it was especially cheering to see Kevin Elyot's My Night with Reg (Criterion) arriving in the West End. Perhaps Reg, premiered in the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs last April, will break the jinx on this beautiful house and inspire a tumult of comic writing in the regions. Elyot's romantic comedy of pain and loss in a middle-class homosexual environment pulsates with humour and poignancy. David Bamber's querulous Guy has enlarged his trailing gestures, and increased the anxiety with which he cups a glass of whiskey in both hands, lurking moonfacedly above the joyful rim. His flat-warming party embraces, over the years, a few beddings and more funerals while the rain beats down.

John Sessions takes off like a rocket as the art dealer and lover of the promiscuous Reg (whom we never see). Reg had worked his way round most of Guy's circle of friends, and beyond: 'Even the vicar told me what a good fuck he was outside the reports Bamber's lightly scandalised host, putting his knees tidily together. Another of Reg's conquests is young Eric (beautifully played by John Duttine) who is decorating Guy's conservatory. Eric knew Reg as 'Dwight', which information has instantly converted your critic to cryptographer: 'Reg Dwight' is the real name of Elton John whose uncle, Roy Dwight, broke a leg playing for Nottingham Forest in the 1959 FA Cup Final. Now that the Guardian's Michael Billington has pointed out the similarities of Elyot's play to Eric Rohmer's My Niaht with Maude (is that why 'Eric' is called we can expect further decdnstructions with reference to pop music, football and the French cinema.

Does Elton John have an Auntie Maude, with whom he might have gone into the garden, or at least the conservatory, or perhaps even the conservatoire? Harold Pinter defeats decoders by the unanswerable simplicity of his writing. Landscape (1968) is a short, poetical piece for two domestic servants in the scrubbed and silent kitchen of a great country house. Ian Holm and Penelope Wilton, as Duff and Beth, aire trapped in an intercutting, and thoroughly riveting, reverie Peter Hall's unforgettable original RSC version (with David -Waller and Peggy Ashcroft) was perhaps chillier, more monumental. Pinter's own production is enthralling, and immediate. Holm and Wilton play with precise accomplishment and dreamy fervour Duff, the chauffeur and handyman, is recalling a walk by a pond, an argument in a pub over the quality of the beer, Beth banging a gong; Beth is re-living a day on the beach, and moments of tenderness with a man who may be Duff, or indeed the house's owner, Mr Sykes, or someone else altogether.

Duff represents the urgent instinct for memorialising the past. He leans forward and tries to break the membrane of Beth 's protective lyricism. She never looks at him. This glis tening little gem of a production (ten more early evening performances, this week and early next) was first seen at the Gate Theatre in Dublin during the Pinter festival last May. Perhaps the National should have paired it with its usual companion, Silence.

But you do not feel short-changed or under- Penelope Witton and Ian Holm in Pinter's Landscape. Photograph by Neil Libbert silliest play he ever saw. Never trust a critic. But trust me when I say that the Magnificent Theatre Company's, valiant, but breathily over-apostrophised, revival does nothing for my revered Dryden's reputation as a practical man of the Restoration theatre. I shall treasure only a climactic farcical masque, 'the frolic of the altitudes', with old buffers stranded on high stools, and the odd exclamatory insult, such as 'A pox oh her mouldy Not enough.

My Night with Reg Criterion Theatre, London WC2 (071-839 4488); Landscape Cottesloe, Royal National Theatre, London SE1 (071-928 2252); Out of the Blue Shaftesbury Theatre, London WC2 (071-379 5399); Stairway to Heaven! King's Head, London Nl (071-226 1916); Sir Martin Mar-All Lilian Baylis, London EC1 (071-278 8916) white background, designed by Nigel Hook, and to leave the music to" an adroit and single pianist, Nick Finlow. Gary Cady and Fiona Sinnott sing sweetly as the romantic couple, and Michael Medwin chips in amiably in the Roger Livesey role of the mediating neurologist. Martin Connor is an acceptable substitute for Marius Goring's. amazing French aristocrat, the man sent by heaven to get Carter. One question: why do young writers want to sound so old? The movie's avant-gardism is reclaimed as material for cosy revue.

Some of the self-conscious Cole Porter-ish rhyming and twee musical jauntiness become tiresome. But Morgan and Metchear could well be a partnership to watch. I look forward to hearing their next songs. Samuel Pepys thought that John Dryden's Sir Martin Mar-All (1667), a crummy conflation of Moliere's L'Etburdt and Quinault's L'Amant indiscret, with invented sub-plot, was a hoot. Pepys also thought that A Midsummer Night's Dream was the nourished after a mere 38 minutes.

For that response you need to sample two hours of Out off the Blue (which, I suspect, will soon be into the red), the dreariest musical in the West End since, oh, last week? At least Copocabana evinced a grislycheery second-rate tattiness, and Only the Lonely had a few Roy Orbison classics. David Gilmore's efficient production assembles an oratorio-like dispute over the parenting of a child in Nagasaki in 1945 mother died of radiation sickness in 1953; the father (now a priest involved in the 25th. anniversary Memorial Day) was an American soldier. Lightly mobile screens, an onstage band, the recriminations of conflict, through-singing, novelistic revelations: all this signals a computerised, cynical synthesis of Sondheim's Pacific Overtures, Lepage's Seven Streams, Les Miserables (David Burt, the outraged Japanese brother, was the original Enjolras) and Miss Saigon. But there is not a single moment of inspired melody in Shun-Ichi Tokura's score, and the book by Paul Sand is simultaneously confusing and trite.

The war in Europe ended a few months earlier, and one of its final near-casualties was David Niven as Peter Carter, the pilot who baled out of a flaming bomber plane without a parachute in A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the extraordinary film part technical fantasy, part love story, part Shavian dispute -of. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The new musical version of that film at the King's Head, written by 25-year-old newcomers Thomas Morgan (music) and Kevin Metchear (book and lyrics), appears under the subtitle by which it is known in America, Stairway to Heaven! The score won this year's Vivian Ellis prize, presumably because it both sounded like a parodistic homage to old Viv, and because it has odd moments, and a few complete songs, of genuine charm and promise. Director Dan Crawford's solution to the film's mixture of monochrome (for heaven) and technicolour (for earth) is to 'shoot' the action modestly against a plain DONMAR mimffm. WAREHOUSE llllilllillil 2 ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL 28th, 29th, 30th NOVEMBER at 8pm 01 71 928 8800 In BMOoUtton wtth Tickets available from Promlor Box Olflco 0171 240 0771 and othor loading agents 1 msi THK INIMilMiNDKNT mm mSi.