The AIDS Plays Project / Play Circle

Speak up! Stand up and speak up!

London Performance Studios is pleased to share ‘Play Circle’, a new series of workshops centred around script-in-hand readings by The AIDS Plays Project.

This new format creates a unique shared experience between stage and spectators, where the cast, seated amongst the audience, will encounter the text for the first time. After the reading, participants are invited to join a lively discussion about the play and its writer, with light refreshments available throughout the evening.

For the first Play Circle, audiences will experience a first, unstaged reading of Milo Lookingale - a frank and furious dispatch from the early years of the epidemic, written and originally performed by Jim Jewell in 1992. The semi-autobiographical text was recently rediscovered by a group of performers and queer activists in Oregon, USA.

Every day, more bad news. In his poky flat, Milo flits between videotapes of his favourite TV quiz shows and his collection of obituaries for dead friends and lovers, carefully cut out and saved. Over the course of seventy-five minutes, Jim Jewell sketches an unbearably moving portrait of an ordinary man asking himself: why have I been spared?

For one night only, it is read by acclaimed theatre artist and performer Dickie Beau