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Andrew Doherty: Sad Gay AIDS Play

 
Paul Fisher Cockburn Review by Paul Fisher Cockburn 4 Published: 3 Aug 2025 Pleasance Dome Show Dates: 30 Jul 2025-24 Aug 2025

Mancunian sketch writer and performer Andrew Doherty clearly comes to the 2025 Fringe with a positive reputation based on his previous hit show, Gay Witch Sex Cult – he’s already attracting near sold-out performances, and there’s a lot of immediate love from the crowd. Thankfully, this is a gift he doesn’t squander; he effectively engages with his audience from the start, and builds on that foundation with real skill.

From the title alone, you might think this isn’t in particularly good taste, but (of course) that’s actually rather the point

Not surprising, really, as there’s a lot to love here: Doherty presents himself as a young man so enthusiastically in love with musicals – thanks to having discovered Six – that he now wants to share with us (in an audience research kind of way) a few scenes from his forthcoming Arts Council England (ACE)-supported musical, AIDS Actually. From the title alone, you might think this isn’t in particularly good taste, but (of course) that’s actually rather the point.

And, at the risk of getting serious, this is clearly one of the issues Doherty is focused on: his character knows the kind of shows that he really wants to make, but his dependence on public subsidy means that ACE effectively call the shots – so when its increasingly demonic representatives, watching him via a conference call, tell him to “AIDS-it-up” and make his show more “Northern” (a challenge for someone from Manchester), he doesn’t have any alternative but to comply. This is combined with their ongoing insistence that he remains “non-political” – which, you could well say, is pretty hard to do when writing about a pandemic which effectively killed a generation of gay men. The challenges faced by public arts subsidies within an increasingly polarised social media are plain to see – and, in Doherty’s hands, also happen to be laugh-out-loud funny too.

To be fair, not everything in this show is yet working on all thrusters – the subplot in which Arts Culture England apparently murders Doherty’s parents (to help give him the emotional trauma he needs to make “great” theatre) doesn’t quite land as well as you might think. And, in a purely technical early-in-the-run sort of way, Doherty’s conversations with a pre-recorded ACE demon are littered with extra-long pauses that can’t entirely be explained away by supposed issues with his broadband width.

Nevertheless, if you’re looking for a laugh-out-loud show that sneaks in some surprisingly serious ideas behind the jokes, then it’s unlikely you’ll find anything better than this particular Sad Gay AIDS Play.

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The Blurb:

A brand-new show from the maker of the award-winning sell-out Gay Witch Sex Cult ('the funniest fringe horror since Garth Marenghi' (Guardian). Andrew Doherty completely relaunches himself with a startling piece of groundbreaking tragic theatre. In this tragic piece that breaks new ground, Andrew throws the book at AIDS and asks the Arts Council to pick it up. Watch Andrew take the cult out of cult hit and replace it with "financially prosperous." Catch it before it gets a West End transfer, moves to Broadway and finally HBO Max.