As Is – Remember the Clause Season

New York City, 1985. Rich, a young writer who is beginning to find success, is breaking up with his longtime lover, Saul, a professional photographer. However Rich’s idyll with his new lover is short-lived when he learns that he has contracted the terrifying new disease AIDS and returns to Saul for sanctuary as he awaits its slow and awful progress. In a mosaic of brilliantly conceived short scenes, blending humour, poignance and dazzling theatricality, As Is captures the pathos of Rich’s relationship with friends and family, the cold impersonality of the doctors and nurses who care for him and the widely diverse aspects of New York’s gay community. A heartbreaking and unsparing examination of a deeply felt human relationship shattered by a mindless, destructive disease.

On 24th May 1988 Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government implemented Section 28, a local authority clause set in UK Law that banned the right to “promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality.” It also outlawed “the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” As part of the Pride Festival 2018, All or Nothing Repertory Theatre Company’s first season aims to highlight the 30 year anniversary of this terrible law.

Part of the Pride Festival