Andrew Doherty’s Sad Gay AIDS Play is a fun satire, a play-within-a-play that challenges ideas about funding for the arts, and what stories need to be told.
The premise is that Doherty is trying to get funding from Arts Council England for his play about housewives, but they are not interested in his vision. Instead, they want his show to be about AIDS. Accordingly, Doherty samples five scenes from AIDS Actually, with direction and heavy-handed input from the Arts Council, brought to us via Zoom.
Doherty had some fantastic moments. When he is told to be politically impartial, he finds himself telling us that AIDS was… fine?, and Margaret Thatcher… existed? An insistence that his play should be set up North made for a real laugh-out-loud highlight of the show.
The premise is great, and he starts out solidly, with a bold characterisation and an annoying demeanour that is surprisingly watchable. The portion of the show dedicated to putting on a comedy about AIDS, as someone who knows nothing about it, is undoubtedly a hilarious concept, and one that I would like to have seen fleshed out more.
However, I wanted to laugh more. I felt that the moments of comedy were up and down, and some of the Arts Council England jokes fell a little flat. Where the play moved from camp, silly fun to more focused satire about arts funding was where I got a little lost.
The message of the satire was a smart political point: making “trauma porn” about social issues should not be a prerequisite for arts funding, and we should not box everyone in to making shows because of their identity. What if a gay man does just want to make a show about housewives stuck in a house?
I think that the AIDS comedy at the start was so well handled that the bar was raised to the point where satire about arts funding felt as if it did not entirely land, or was not quite as funny. Doherty’s comedic skill was evident throughout, but sometimes felt wasted on a struggling artist bit that was difficult to be invested in.
Nonetheless, Andrew Doherty is a talented comedian, and the pure silliness of much of Sad Gay AIDS Play makes it absolutely worth the time (also, I got a sick badge at the end).
Sad Gay AIDS Play is running until 24 August at 10 Dome at Pleasance Dome.
Buy tickets here.
Image courtesy of Pleasance Press Office, provided to The Student as press material.