Positive, Park Theatre, N4

reviewed for The Times, 15 July 2015

Shaun Kitchener and Timothy George in Kitchener’s play, Positive

At the height of the Aids crisis, theatre gave us tragedies and epics: My Night With Reg in the UK, the Miltonic fantasia Angels in America in the US. Twenty years later, an HIV diagnosis in the west means an instant introduction, not to the angel of death, but to the jargon of life-long health monitoring (and that’s a long life, nowadays): viral load, CD4 count, serum chemistry panel. The dull catalogue of common things.

This is the playwright Shaun Kitchener’s challenge. Taking the melodrama out of the Aids narrative, Positive is a comedy of HIV manners. The moralising tone and low-stakes chitchat of the opening half can sometimes be dull — it’s hard to feel pathos for a cast who keep telling us what full and happy lives they can hope to live, integrated into their nice flatshares in a comfortable part of London. Yet there’s enough wit and warmth in this promising young writer’s script to draw us in when the stakes get high.

Benji (Timothy George) is 26, has been HIV positive for about a year and, in a bolt-on that’s never convincingly explored, is obsessed with Britney Spears. Nikki, his flatmate, is forcing him on a blind date with her boyfriend’s gay friend. His mother (a heart-clenching Sally George) is bombarding him with voicemails “trying to understand”. Yet Nikki is struggling with her own HIV status and what it means for her career in Africa with her boyfriend, Greg (a likeable Paul Heelis).

The HIV-positive experience in 2015 is a minefield of awkward negotiations and it’s hard not to feel that more could be done here. From two potential lovers, Benji encounters poisonous phobia and unconditional acceptance respectively — but where is the hesitation of the well-intentioned?

However, Kitchener can write a brilliant comic sketch and scatters them generously. Clearly, he’s a playwright to watch.