Tell Me How It Ends review – 80s-set HIV drama offers a blast of polemical power

Everyman, Liverpool
Tasha Dowd’s big-hearted play is about a Liverpudlian woman who befriends HIV patients at the height of the Aids crisis, and features a ferocious broadside in favour of public services, civic spirit and LGBTQ+ rights

It is the end of the 1980s and Aster is doing her bit by befriending Liverpool HIV patients. She is well-meaning and resilient but has one flaw: she has a compulsive way of spoiling the plot. In Tasha Dowd’s play, whenever Aster recommends a book, she always lets slip the twist on the final page.

What starts as a quirky character trait grows into a metaphor. There will come a point when the medication of Marc, the man to whom she becomes closest, will cease to keep him alive. At that moment, he will need to cut short his life story and skip to the end.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/9BPybpu

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two years after Buffalo mass shooting, an art exhibit focuses on the victims

A few months after 14 May 2022, a curator sought out three local artists. The resulting exhibition, Before and After Again, is thought to be the first of its kind Two years ago, a white supremacist drove 200 miles to Buffalo, New York, and opened fire in a grocery store in the city’s predominantly Black East Side neighborhood, killing 10 people and injuring three. Though the Tops Friendly Markets where the racist mass shooting took place has been remodeled, and most of the country has forgotten about the violence that occurred on 14 May 2022, Buffalo’s East Side is forever changed. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/mqu1LFv
Read more

£1 Thursdays review – nightclubbing, sex talk and big decisions

Finborough theatre, London A mix of sweet observations about female friendship and cheeky brazenness about sex, Kat Rose-Martin’s play finds two young women at a crossroads in their lives In the cold air outside a sticky nightclub in Bradford, 17-year-olds Stacey and Jen are at a crossroads. In one direction lies the world they know: the family stress, the looming exams, the pumping pop beats at the club where they’ll reliably pull boys from school. In the other direction lies an uncertain path, and questions of who they are apart from one another, whether they could be the first in their families to go to university, and how to afford it if they do. Constantly on their minds, while they’re drunkenly dancing the nights away, is where they’ll end up, and what to do if they are the ones left behind. Thoughtful if not revelatory, £1 Thursdays covers an uneasy period of big decisions in these characters’ lives, as the gap between them widens. Monique Ashe-Palmer (Six) is ebullient as St
Read more