THE PLAYS

Jerker
Christmas On Mars
Camille

THE PLAYWRIGHTS

Robert Chesley
Harry Kondoleon
Charles Ludlam

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London’s queer creatives: ‘We feel unsupported by the bastions of creativity like the National Theatre.’

The Evening Standard

Joe Bromley, May 30th 2024

“Around a blue-lit, shrunken stage at London Performance Studios last month, a bustling crowd of queers erupted into feverish, teary applause. A performance of Jerker, the 1986 play about phone sex during the AIDS pandemic by the late San Franciscan playwright Robert Chesley, had just concluded.

It was the spot to be that Saturday night, and only the latest in a string of evenings put on by The AIDS Plays Project, an organisation founded by Alastair Curtis ‘to revive parts of our archive or history’, he explains. As of last June, Curtis has been elbow-deep in research, digging out old plays and manuscripts written by those who lost their lives to HIV/AIDS, ‘many of which, 40 years later, have been marginalised or relatively forgotten’. 

This momentum-building project is one of a number of grassroots, LGBTQIA+ performing arts set-ups currently bubbling across the city. Why? Curtis thinks people are turning their backs on the establishment. ‘We are largely unsupported by the bastions of creativity and theatrical innovation in London. In the absence of that ecosystem, we have to develop our own.


Holly James Johnston/Orlando in ‘Camille’ 
(Photo: Henry Mills)





The AIDS Plays Project is reviving the forgotten plays of writers who died of HIV/AIDS. 

HERO

Barry Pierce, December 6th 2023
In conversation with Alastair Curtis

“I saw a picture of Harry Kondoleon taken by Peter Hujar in 1983 and I thought: what a stunner! I ended up researching him and found very little online, but I saw that he was a playwright and I managed to track down various out-of-print copies of his plays and I was sort of stunned by the idiosyncrasy of his work, how bizarre and eccentric it is, but also how pioneering it was. 

Kondoleon won an Obie for Most Promising Playwright in 1983 for Christmas on Mars, which he shared with the playwright David Mamet. I thought: what a shame that a writer who was ceaselessly inventive and pioneering in his queerness has not entered the mainstream in the same way. He was part of a generation of New York playwrights, but because of his premature death in 1994 he hasn’t really had the legacy that he deserves.”

Nathan Armarkwei-Laryea
in ‘Christmas on Mars’ 
(Photo: Tyler Kelly)





Alastair Curtis on Rediscovering Plays by Writers Lost to AIDS

frieze

Sam Moore, May 30th 2024
In conversation with Alastair Curtis

“As a playwright, I’m always on the lookout for queer writers from our theatrical history. Currently, we’re in this moment of revival of interest in art that was produced in and around the early years of the AIDS crisis, but I was struck by the idea that we haven’t had a similar movement in theatre history.

We see it as our mission to highlight the careers of talented but lesser-known playwrights whose lives were cut short. We want to pay tribute to what they achieved in their lifetime, the plays they put out and communities that they were part of. And writers who were on the brink of fame that didn’t quite have the time or the attention to develop into the artists they could have been.

I think of it as a poetic restitution. Too often these plays live in the rarefied grip of academics. Access to these writers should not be the preserve of those with an education. The central gesture of our project is forging a connection between these writers and our queer community now.”


Syrus Lowe in ‘Jerker’
(Photo: Henry Mills)