Stephen K Amos

Stephen K Amos

A circuit stalwart, Stephen K Amos made his Edinburgh debut in 2001, returned in 2003, and has performed there every year since. He has also appeared the Melbourne Comedy Festival every year from 2006 to 2009.

Amos has also acted in a number of dramatic plays at the Fringe, including One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest with Christian Slater in 2004 - which later transferred to the West End – and Talk Radio in 2006.

On TV, he has performed stand-up on Live at the Apollo and the 2007 Royal Variety Performance and appeared on several panel shows, including Have I Got News For You, Mock The Week, The Wright Stuff and Loose Women, where, in February 2009, he caused a stir by revealing that Prince Harry told him he 'didn't sound like a black chap’ after his appearance at a gig to celebrate Prince Charles's 60th birthday.

In 2007 Amos made an acclaimed Channel 4 documentary on homophobia in the black British community and in Jamaica, Batty Man. He is also in the cast of 2009 BBC Two sitcom In My Country, a multicultural show set in a run-down guest house.

In 2004, he won a Time Out award for comedy, and he has been nominated for the Chortle Award for best compere three times, in 2004, 2007 and 2008.

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My Night With Reg

Review of the new theatre revival, with Stephen K Amos

Kevin Elyot’s tragi-comic Olivier-winning play, set against the backdrop of the 1980s Aids epidemic, has been revived several times since its 1994 Royal Court debut, including an acclaimed version six years ago. Its relevance today, however, probably owes more to the runaway success of Russell T Davis’s similarly-set It’s A Sin on Channel 4 than the grip of another fatal pandemic.

Not that My Night With Reg is directly about the disease; rather that the deaths it causes among a group of friends and lovers stalks their lives and focusses their minds on the nature of relationships, sex, connectedness and missed opportunities.

Knowing personality-led comments mean there are also laughs both among the characters and at their expense, at least until the ever-present shadow of death, batters them down.

Things are, however, relatively carefree when the play opens on a modest flat-warming party thrown by Guy (Paul Keating), a fussy, timid, highly-strung man, too shy to do anything about his abject loneliness, accumulating heaps of well-ordered records and knick-knacks instead of relationships. He’s had a crush on the charismatic John (played with brooding aloofness by Edward M Corrie) since their uni days but never been able to express it.

Globetrotting life-and-soul hedonist Daniel (Gerard McCarthy) turns up without his partner Reg, who, it emerges, might not have been exactly faithful, while James Bradwell is Brummie Eric the young painter-and-decorator working on the flat who gets gradually drawn into to the orbit of these casual friends.

Night with reg guy and daniel on the sofa

Of special interest to comedy fans is that Stephen K Amos has been cast as Benny. It’s not the biggest role in the play but offers more than enough stage time for the stand-up to make his mark as a larger-than-life chipper Cockney chancer with an occasional Sid James laugh. Peculiar as it seems – and it never quite chimes true – he’s in a relationship with the dull-as-ditchwater Bernie (a droll Alan Turkington), and the odd-couple relationship is the source of some of the best gags.

The cast have a great chemistry along all the axes, most lines laden with unsaid meaning. That all the characters are friends might seem a little unlikely, though it’s acknowledged in Elyot’s careful script which slides from comedy of manners into something more intimate and melancholic by the time they’ve buried the second of their friends. The tonal shift caused can make My Night With Reg feel a little like two conjoined plays, which director Matt Ryan doesn’t quite smooth over, but each part has its power.

For this is a thoughtful, often delightful, portrait of disparate characters, hostage to their immutable personality traits, even in the face of extreme situations, and destined to sadness because of it. 

• My Night with Reg is at the Turbine Theatre in Battersea, South London, until August 21.

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Published: 28 Jul 2021

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Past Shows

Edinburgh Fringe 2001

Stephen K Amos


Edinburgh Fringe 2003

Stephen K Amos


Edinburgh Fringe 2005

Stephen K Amos


Edinburgh Fringe 2010

Stephen K Amos: The Best Medicine


Montreal 2007

Britcom 2007


Agent

Glorious Management
Contact by email
Lower Ground Floor
79 Noel Road
N1 8HE
Office: 020 7704 6555

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