Reception is a play based on the premise that an hour spent with a stranger waiting in a reception can reveal more than an hour with a good therapist. As a result, two damaged people make a fragile connection in the midst of their chaotic lives. David Carter’s play takes a hard hitting look at what happens “when life deals some killer blows and the choices start to run out”.
The play is the theatre’s first co-production with Chrysalis, a theatre company that works to highlight issues around drug use, alcohol dependency and HIV. The play opens in Bristol in October and then moves to the West End in the New Year.
Reception is at the Alma Tavern, Clifton, Bristol, October 19-30 (Tuesday to Saturday) Ticket £6/£5 concessions. 0117 946 7899 or www.theatrewest.co.uk
The Lilies (1996), an extravagantly mannered gay revenge fantasy, by Canadian filmmaker John Greyson (Zero Patience, Uncut) is now available on DVD and video in the UK.
The film opens in a men’s prison in northern Quebec in 1952 where Bishop Bilodeau (Marcel Sabourin) is lured into hearing the confession of a dying prisoner. He ends up a captive of the prison’s gay contingent and is forced to watch their re-enactment of a play.
The play turns into the story of a lethal gay triangle set in a Catholic boy’s school 40 years earlier where Bilodeau is just 18. As the prison walls melt away, the richly imagined land of Roberval reveals a shimmering tale of lost love between two young men.
Lilies, adapted from Michel Marc Bouchard’s play Les Feluettes, is hailed as a “rich, exotic visual journey and a tense drama of tangled emotions and savage repercussions.”
Check for local screenings at www.film.guardian.co.uk
Patrick Donnelly’s first collection of poems is a powerful evocation of gay love and loss in the era of the Aids epidemic in New York.
‘The Charge’ has fifty short lyrical poems about sex, love and death which have an almost electric charge and a powerful emotional intensity. Fleeting flirtations with a beautiful boy on the Brooklyn Subway, with the dishy waiter in a Village café (‘Your Café con Leche Hands’), or with guys seen at the Met or at the gym are the background to a dreamy fantasy world which is both honest and erotic.
But musings of mortality pervade throughout, none more so than when Donnelly writes with sadness and loss about friends who have died from Aids. ‘Riddle’ asks ‘What makes your cells its brothel... your life, its toilet’? And the answer is glaringly obvious to anyone with any knowledge of the HIV virus. But the strength of Donnelly’s prose is its intelligence, clarity and tenderness.
There is dearth of decent literature about the HIV epidemic, apart from the writing of Paul Monette and Adam Mars Jones, but Donnelly manages to hit home and hit hard without recourse to sentimentality or preciousness.
Even if you haven’t read a poem in years, take a look at this book. It may remind you that poetry can still be, to quote Ezra Pound, ‘News that stays news’. (MJF)
‘The Charge’ by Patrick Donnelly is published by the Ausable Press and can be ordered from Amazon.co.uk price £7.82
A series of free events at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre will explore humankind’s obsession with facial recognition, reconstruction, disfigurement and beauty. Organisers says the events will provide an unrivalled opportunity to discuss and debate the technological, social, ethical, moral and political implications of advancements in facial surgery. It will complement the Science Museum’s Future Face exhibition running from October to February. The programme starts on October 5 at 6.30pm with Rearranging Faces, an exploration of facial disfigurement and reconstructive surgery.
The Dana Centre, 165 Queen’s Gate, London. Events are free but must be booked in advance on 0207 942 4040. Visit www.danacentre.org.uk
