Evening Standard from London, Greater London, England • 16

1 6 FRIDAY 23 JANUARY 1 998 EVENING STANDARD Boycott comes face to face with Ms ex-lover by NICK PRYER CRICKET legend Geoffrey Boycott has been confronted by exlover Margaret Moore for the first time since he allegedly beat her up in a hotel in the South of France In a heated showdown Mrs Moore waved a photograph of her bruised face which she claims he caused The meeting took place yesterday in the London offices of The Sun newspaper where Boycott had earlier conducted an angry news conference Mrs Moore alleges the former Yorkshire and England batsman pinned her down and punched her at least 20 times in the face after an argument in the hotel in October 1996 A French judge agreed with her and gave Boycott 57 a suspended jail sentence and fined him £5100 on Tuesday The Yorkshireman agreed to Yesterday once more: Daisy Beaumont and Oliver Milbum return to the Sixties for the final chapter of The Day I Stood Still Picture: ALASTAIR MUIR Margaret Moore: A dance to the comedy of time YOU might imagine a comedy which deals with a middle-aged gay man still nursing an unrequited crush on a long-lost school chum with Mars bars serving as a sex-substitute and gold neck-chains bringing people together would be no more enticing than a box full of theatrical cliches with a pretty bow on top How wrong you would be Kevin The day I Stood Still deals with familiar aspects of sex and hopeless love Yet he plays such ingenious games with time and coincidence that the jigsaw puzzle of revelations are not completed until the last shattering moments I doubt the play will achieve the enormous impact of 1994 comedy of gay sexual manners in the age of Aids My Night with Reg which won him a feast of awards and the Evening Standard prize as Most Promising Playwright But here the same artful finesse the sense of life as some preor FINAL WEEK of our Geoffrey Boycott: wicked Why are you doing this?" answer Mrs Moore's questions across a table in a conference room with editor Stuart Higgins acting as a mediator and with Sun reporters acting as witnesses the paper said When Mrs Moore showed him the photograph she asked him: you explain how I came to look like this? I fall did I Boycott walked off saying: wicked why are you doing this to To which Mrs Moore replied: In an earlier exchange Boycott said: are being vindictive You know not true First of all it was marriage then it was money You went to Max Clifford for a million His ex-lover replied: untrue I can prove that and that you offered me £150000 not to Boycott (pointing angrily): never offered you a penny because I did nothing wrong We have taped evidence of you wanting money Your solicitors and legal men wanting Mrs Moore: the phone Geoffrey from Jumby Bay (an exclusive Caribbean resort) you offered me Meanwhile the increasingly bitter battle seems set to run and run Officials at the court in Grasse near Nice where Boycott was found guilty have reportedly granted him a retrial because anyone convicted in absentia has the right to a retrial under French law A have to kill for AN AMERICAN greetings card firm is tackling one of the most sensitive subjects of all suicide writes Barbara McMahon Hallmark has produced a card for people to send when a family member or perhaps the person next door decides life is no longer worth living It may sound like a bad joke but the company says reacting to a growing social problem Some 32000 Americans a year commit suicide and by government estimates for each of those suicides there are at least six people who are closely affected a lot of people to send cards to FIRST NIGHT by Nicholas de Jongh The Day I Stood Still Cottesloe Theatre dained dance in which we are forced to take part while time brings on its revenges And Ian superlatively cast production imposes just the right air of dreamy strangeness Mark Thompson's eerie stage design upon a revolving stage sets the unsettling mood Everything is bleak sparseness The sitting room in a north London mansion block has nothing on its walls virtually no fiimiture except for a piano and a chair no view from its balcony except of infinite blackness Here middle-aged Horace very like gay anti-hero in My Night With Reg faces up to the first over-elaborated comedy of manners: the unscheduled visit of Judy a friend from Horace's schooldays and her new man clashes with the arrival of Terence his first hired hustler True to the bleak comedy Jake convincing Terence arouses Horace an apologetic chap something small in museums to no more than confession of eternal love for a dead heterosexual unrequited passion which strangely echoes the poet AE Housman's hopeless ardour for a rower in Tom The Invention of Love was for a school friend husband Jerry The idea of Horace abandoning aU thought of sex for years in tribute to his school-time passion seems preposterous But the next scene 13 years later when Selected lines of Wedgwood test quality BONE CHINA TABLEWARE 71 plus adolescent son Jimi (a memorably distraught Oliver Milbum) appears in Horace's living room and confesses his own ruined gay affair is high with pathos irony and the cocaine supplied by the youth Adrian Horace as he faces up to memories and revenants loses all his earlier fussiness and reeks of pain By playing a game with time in the style of JB Priestley and reverting in the final scene to the Sixties when Horace loses hope of Jerry Elyot achieves a coup de theatre The Sixties atmosphere seems rather forced Yet Milbum who also plays the young Jerry suggests how an erotic spell can be cast for years The final desolate image is of Horace whose sexless future we already know imprisoned in a house where he and time wifi never move on Ratings: adequate good irk very good outstanding poor More reviews: Page 49 Imperfect Wedgwood tableware ranges at discounted prices OFFERS TO BE FOUND AT THE FOLLOWING STORES: 158 Regent Street London 0171 734 7262 173174 Picadilly London 01716292614.