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| Dan Phillips |
Dan Phillips writes for West End Frame about directing Safe Sex and On Tidy Endings at the Tristan Bates Theatre.
When a small community of gay men in San Francisco in the late 70s began to fall down dead, the fears of a ‘gay cancer’ quickly got around. By the mid-80s over 15,000 Americans had died of what was to become known as AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) and across the pond another 8,000 had died by the same time. In this time of fear and confusion, the one thing to strive and grow was art.
There are plenty of examples of theatre which looked to explore the AIDS epidemic and tried to offer a viewpoint from within the community it had hit the hardest. Companies such as Doric Wilson’s The Other Side of Silence and Gay Sweatshop in the UK were working with new writers and producing gay theatre from and for the gay community. This was the first time gay artists had a voice and were starting to become visible within the wider community; however, it was AIDS that truly outed the entire gay world. Works like Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart broke ground in the early 80s with its portrayal of a man with AIDS on stage, and along with Tony Kushner’s Angels In America and a little later Jonathan Larson’s rock musical Rent, there was a sudden burst of plays that had something to say and something to show. These are all very important pieces of theatre which have all made it onto the big screen (The Normal Heart being the last to make the transition after its 2013 Tony Award for best revival) but they all have the same flaw, they only really deal with people with the virus.
