Canadian writer Nick Green’s Casey and Diana is a crafted, intelligent and in the end moving tribute to those who lived through – and died during – in the AIDS crisis. Set in a real place, Toronto’s Casey House HIV/AIDS hospice, it recreates (with considerable artistic licence) a real event: a headline-making visit from Princess Diana in 1991.

Green distills the event into events taking place in one room, home to Thomas, who has exceeded all expectations (including his own) by surviving for five months and a new arrival, and Andre, a young man struggling to accept the fact that this bed will be the one he dies in.

Both men are seriously ill (their Kaposi sarcoma lesions are very evident and in this production very realistically rendered) but for Thomas especially, the prospect of meeting a real-life princess gives him a new – if short – lease on life. He excitedly recalls watching her wedding on TV in 1981, her extravagant dress “looking like this giant ball of Kleenex.” 

But Diana’s visit is seven days away and for men as seriously ill as these, life is measured one day at a time.