Alan Bowne died of AIDS in 1989, but his ground-breaking play BEIRUT had received its first outing 3 years earlier in the August of 1986, at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival on the outskirts of San Francisco.Since that time, millions worldwide have died of the disease; yet millions more live day-to-day with HIV, but thankfully the transformation in both understanding and treatment (particularly in the West where access to a daily tablet renders it littler more than a manageable and un-transmittable condition akin to diabetes for many sufferers) has been little short of miraculous.
In Bowne's play, we are presented with a quarantined positive male named simply Torch (Robert Rees) whose negative girlfriend Blue (Louisa Connolly-Burnham) has managed to sneak undetected into Manhattan's quarantine zone - the aptly named Beirut of the title - in a bid to pick-up where they left off before the authorities so rudely interrupted their burgeoning sexual romance. He is resistant for fear of infecting her. She, we learn, loves him to the point that she no longer cares about lesions and dying young. At one point they are interrupted by a guard on his nightly rounds to assess the disease development of his inmates (Simon Mendes da Costa). Blue passes herself off as a visiting prostitute and the guard gets his kicks by ordering Torch to touch her intimately, until a sex alarm goes off ruining his fun.
The play itself is a fairly rudimentary affair about how society deals with issues of humanity and how humanity faces up to problematic social issues. The question is whether (given the raft of far more sophisticated and complex dramas on the subject) BEIRUT is still relevant? Unfortunately for this reviewer, much of the plague dialogue exchanges in director Robin Lefevre's production felt tedious and juvenile. It was like watching a steamy, but third rate Tennessee Williams play. Moments of nakedness (bum cheeks abound as well as other genitalia) and simulated sexual acts, aren't particularly shocking, or indeed titillating and any potential dystopian gravitas largely evaporated within 5 minutes of the lovers being reunited. One thankful mercy is that the running time is a mere 60 minutes and the Park Theatre has a more than adequately stocked bar with which to eradicate any memory of this woeful affair.
Watching the vintage musical KISS ME KATE, currently playing a two week run at the vast Coliseum Theatre as part of a national tour by Opera North, is a very old fashioned experience for the best and worst reason.