One of the highlights of the Edinburgh international festival is a revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, an era-defining play set at the height of the Aids crisis. In a smaller room of the same city is Jacob Sparrow’s debut – an award-winning two-hander that captures the desperation and hope of young men with Aids in the 1990s.
It is a miniature piece, relatively speaking, and surprisingly uplifting, given the subject matter. The setup is apparently inspired by the real-life public furore around plans to build an Aids hospice in a Suffolk village. Sparrow’s characters, both gay and at close quarters with HIV, ruefully mention the fears in this village around the potential contamination of their cows if the hospice were to be built.
Inside a house owned by a well-meaning, off-stage woman who is inviting people with HIV/Aids to seek sanctuary here instead, two men meet in the kitchen. Michael (Matthew Tennyson) is young, infected and angry, while the other (Richard Cant) is older, unnamed and more mysterious, but happily living with his partner in retirement, he says.
They get talking and it is really an opportunity for Michael to reveal his backstory: his first, incandescent love, the moment he was told he was HIV positive, losing friend after friend to Aids and his feelings towards the narrow-minded villagers who seem to care about the welfare of cows over humans.
Directed by Josh Seymour, both actors give delicately emotional performances which become deeply moving. Amid the darkness is Michael’s barely whispered hope for more life, and a greater sense of joy in living – and loving – as a gay man despite the death around him.
There are plot twists and contrivances which you see coming from the start. These jar, as does the warm tying up of the story at the end, which feels tonally at odds with this abject moment of prejudice in the history of the illness. But Sparrow still captures a moment, his play determined not to simply paint everything black. There are also some lovely, lyrical passages in his script that showcase the potential of his talent.
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At Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, until 31 August
