"Viral Sutra"
By David Carter
Now playing at the Finborough Theatre until September 2 2006
This speeding bullet of a play by young writer David Carter is one dynamically-charged hour that contains the story of life as told by a living but deadly organism, the HIV virus no less. Carter has been HIV-positive since 1998 and one night realised that his virus was a life-form too, that had its own special zest for life, and so this play was born.
The play centres on the huge bed in David's bedroom as he takes himself back to the time of his infection, engaging in macabre and matter-of-fact conversations with his own virus. Whiplash humour abounds as Gag, Cap and Pol, each a fragment of the HIV virus, caper around David's body/bedroom, engaging in quickfire repartee, veering from compassion for their new host, to the stone-hearted knowledge that he must die so that they can live.
Each has their own job to do: attach to their new host (Cap), evolve/mutate (Gag), replicate (Pol). And it really wasn't their fault their old host Charlotte died, it was an overdose, a few stains on the bed, and that's it. Life must go on.
Gag and Cap wriggle with David under the duvet while the artistic Pol paints his portrait and then seduces him with a dance and kiss of death for him, reproduction for her.
The playwright's eloquent comment on the flourishing of this deadly epidemic with no known cure can only come from the mouths of his cheeky creations Cap and Gag: Thank God for ignorance and superstition. And the Pope. Thank you, Pope.
Thank you, David Carter for this zany, highly original and way-out-there play.
Reviews by Julia Hickman for Theatreworld Internet Magazine
