Was sex something to be pursued or avoided? In the days before the importance of condoms was known, when kissing alone might be the path to illness and death, AIDS forced this painful choice. For another, liberation meant the preparedness to take responsibility, even though that meant renouncing sexual congress.
For one group, gay sexuality meant hard-won sexual liberation without persecution - and the right to promiscuity as a form of freedom and self-discovery.
Inevitably it also raises parallels to today’s coronavirus pandemic - ignorance, denial, shocking misinformation, and avoidance at governmental level were appalling factors then, in some ways more dismayingly than now.īut what Kramer’s play dramatises most importantly is the angry debate between two sides of radical gay politics. Today it seems that everyone knows about AIDS it’s both enthralling and important to revisit a play about the period when nobody knew enough.
Immediately it evokes the era of bewilderment and panic that surrounded the early recognition of AIDS in New York: it strikes notes of extreme pathos from the first. The new National Theatre production of Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart (1985), directed by Dominic Cooke, is both moving and fascinating.
0 kommentar(er)
