Around a blue-lit, shrunken stage at the Penarth Centre (certainly one of London’s lesser visited hangouts, found in South Bermondsey) 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 and activist Robert Chesley, had just concluded — and the giddy crowd was about to relocate to a nearby mansion for an after-party.
It was the spot to be that Saturday night, and only the latest in a string of evenings put on by The Aids Play Project, an organisation founded by playwright and director 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’.
