Plagued for their Offence: AIDS and Theatrical Representation

Dirk Visser (University of Groningen, the Netherlands)

Throughout history, the notions of disease and morality have been closely linked. Since the time when Jesus’ disciples asked their master what sins a blind man’s parents had committed that he had been born blind, many people have envisaged a link between disease and a person’s moral conduct. Trying to make sense of a mysterious or threatening disease, people forged a link between morality and illness, establishing the idea of illness as divine retribution for one’s transgressions. In subsequent centuries, leprosy, the plague and syphilis, to mention the most notorious examples, were interpreted in moral rather than medical terms. Interpreting illness in terms of moral causality served a dual purpose: it provided an explanation for the disease, thus making it less threatening, and it safely removed the disease to the realm of the ‘other’, the sinner.

At the close of the twentieth century, AIDS was the latest disease to be interpreted in terms of morality. Soon labeled ‘the gay plague’ by the popular press, AIDS was interpreted in terms of sin and punishment rather than in terms of infection and treatment. Likewise, visual marks of the disease, in particular the KP-lesion on the patient’s body, became veritable Marks of Cain, identifying not so much a patient as a sinner receiving his just deserts.

As the disease itself was immediately imbedded in a discourse of divine retribution and moral corruption, it became unavoidable for artists who wanted to make sense of AIDS in their productions to enter the moral debate surrounding the epidemic. In my paper, I will discuss how theatre-makers in particular created new words and images to represent AIDS on stage. Difficulties that they faced, for instance, were the question on how to truthfully represent an AIDS-infected body, and what discourse to use, when the world at large can only phrase AIDS-talk in terms of guilt and punishment.

The starting point for my paper is formed by two American plays. One, The Normal Heart (1984) was one of the first plays to discuss AIDS on stage. The other, Angels in America, saw its first performance in the early 1990s, but is set in the early days of the disease. Though entirely different in outlook, both plays deal with the problem of representing a disease which is surrounded by moral condemnation. Remarkably, both plays recently saw a revival: The Normal Heart was given a gala performance on Broadway in spring 2004, and Angels in America was recently aired on television, both in America and Europe.

Putting the question of AIDS and theatrical representation within the wider perspective of art and ethics, I will discuss what moral message these two plays, which originated some twenty years ago, might convey through their use of word and image to an audience today.