In the last few years, there has been renewed cultural interest in the AIDS crisis, with programs like It’s a Sin appearing on our televisions, and the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt displayed for the first time since the 1990s. But for director and screenwriter Alastair Curtis, there was a glaring gap in this revival campaign: theatre.
“It was a significant omission, because theatre was disproportionately affected by the AIDS crisis – scores of actors, writers, directors and audience members passed away due to the epidemic,” Curtis tells Broadsheet.
This, combined with the “scarcity of queer work on stage today”, led him to “want to reclaim plays from the queer canon that were sidelined and marginalised in their own lifetimes, but can speak acutely to the present”.
So, since autumn of 2023, as part of the AIDS Plays Project, Curtis has been staging plays by writers whose lives were cut short by HIV/AIDS – plays that hadn’t been performed in decades, or ever.
He aims to get as many of these works performed as possible, so the stagings are minimal. The actors rehearse with him for just three days, then read from their scripts on the stage, which is usually occupied by just a few seats and lecterns, leaving audiences to flesh out the scenes with their own imaginations.
“We could, in theory, have gathered enough funding for a one-off performance of one play, fully staged and costumed with a nice starry cast,” Curtis says. “But with the ambition of platforming as many writers as possible, rehearsed readings were the answer to allow us to stage a new play every few months.”
A new series of so-called Play Circle performances is stripped back even further: audiences enter the rehearsal room, sitting among actors as they read through a play after only a day’s practice.
The next Play Circle staging is a reading of It’s Only the End of the World by playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce. Largarce is well known in France, but this will be the first time his work is staged in the UK. (It’s already sold out.)
The play is semi-autobiographical, about a playwright and director who returns to his family in a poor French village after a long absence, dying with a disease that is implied to be HIV/AIDS.
“It has the most beautiful, brilliant monologues. It’s like watching a family go at each other around the dinner table for an hour and a half,” Curtis says.
He hopes that the works read in this format will eventually be officially staged, but for now he just wants to get them out of the moth-eaten queer archive and back into the public consciousness.
“The crisis was such a wearisome, terrifyingly apocalyptic moment that the recording of performed work for future generations was obviously less important than surviving,” he says. “But we are the last generation that can reconnect with these works, as we’re losing our queer elders.
“So as long as we keep getting the opportunities to stage them, we will.”
Tickets sell out fast, so it’s worth subscribing to the AIDS Plays Project’s newsletter for updates.
