shy, and I go and hide behind my characters." Reed also loved to play Jack Point in Yeomen, a tragicomic character. "Jack Point is me in another age – just a strolling player. I really believe I could die of a broken heart". Reed said that every comedian savours the chance to play a role like Point in which "you like to see if you can make 'em cry a little". He also noted that, generally, "I like anything where the dancing comes in". His least favourite role was Major-General Stanley in Pirates, a role that he relinquished in 1969. He also found two drawbacks to playing King Gama: "the heavy make-up ... hid every feature of his face except his eyes, and made it impossible for him to wear his glasses so that he could do his newspaper crossword while waiting to go on". Of the "younger" roles he played even in his later years with the company, Reed said, "I feel I'm so fundamentally a young person. ... I'm older than the part I'm playing, for instance, but I feel young." He loved performing for children and delighted in the gala "last nights" of each London season with the D'Oyly Carte, where he would perform for glittering audiences of "Prime Ministers, Lord Chancellors and First Lords of the Admiralty." In its obituary, The Guardian asserted: Reed's "comic timing, nimble footwork and clarity of diction made him the acknowledged master of the "patter" roles, at once the most challenging and defining of all Gilbert and Sullivan's creations. His biographer, Cynthia Morey, praised his "feet that hardly seemed to touch the floor as he danced across the stage; the sly glance and raised eyebrow that could bring the house down." The Times called his stage personality "impish", writing: "He was, quite simply, a phenomenon. For 48 gruelling weeks of each of those 20 years he effortlessly negotiated the tongue-twisting patter songs." The latter paper judged Reed a success in his desire to play pathos: "His Jack Point, the lovelorn jester in The Yeomen of the Guard, and the role which he dubbed 'the one apart, the Hamlet of Gilbert and Sullivan', could easily bring a tear to the eye, as did his spoken rendition of 'Iolanthe, thou livest?'" Of his Ko-Ko, The Times stated, "The brightest performance of the evening comes from Mr. John Reed, a spirited Ko-Ko with exactly