Carving in Snow

I'm really looking forward to The Normal Heart , the HBO film of Larry Kramer's monumentally important 1985 play. The was the first truly great play to address the HIV AIDS crisis: a passionate play of politics and polemics that reinvented the civil rights movement. Ned Weeks, the play's central character and Kramer's alter ego, railed against and changed a world that had fallen silent in the face of catastrophe. One of the play's chief targets was President Ronald Reagan, who infamously did not utter the word "AIDS" until September 1985, four years into the epidemic and five months after this play. It came just a year before Timothy Conigrave 's Soft Targets at Sydney's Griffin Theatre Company, a play that was Australia's first theatrical response.     At first, no one wanted to produce The Normal Heart , but it became a triumph for Joe Papp's Public Theater. The film rights were promptly optioned by Barbra Streisand in 1986. It...

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good - in spite of all the people who say he is very good. (Robert Graves) First encounter Scratch a theatre director, and you're likely to find a bit of Shakespeare just below the skin. And so it is with me. One of of my very earliest theatre experiences was of Shakespeare: Derek Jacobi as Hamlet, with the touring Old Vic Company, directed by Toby Robertson. The production played at Her Majesty's Theatre (now apartments) in Sydney for five nights in December 1979. I remember little, other than I found it 'superlative'. My diary records this response. I must have just learned the word. Derek Jacobi as Hamlet, 1979. Later, I realised what a key production and performance this was. Earlier that year, the Old Vic (actually, the Prospect Theatre Company resident at the Old Vic) became the first English-speaking company to play in post-revolutionary China. Jacobi also enjoyed the distinction ...