Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh
Jacob Sparrow’s award-winning two-hander finds hope and humanity amid the prejudice and loss of the 1990s
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.
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