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.
Chad Traupmann in Casey and Diana. Photo © Teniola Komolafe
Casey and Diana premiered in 2023 on Ontario’s Stratford Festival and it has been mounted several times in quick succession across Canada. This production, directed by Nancy Denis, is its Australian premiere.
Green structures the two-act play around an inexorable seven-day countdown, lending even its lighter moments a quiet sense of dread. There are echoes of Angels in America in its fever dreams and its porous boundary between reality and fantasy, while Thomas possesses a Kushner-esque loquaciousness, a darkly comic gift for finding humour in catastrophe.
The Loading Dock’s shallow stage imposes some hard limits on a director’s vision and blocking but Denis uses it well and she has assembled very good and convincing cast. As Thomas, Chad Traupmann commands attention from the moment he enters. Beneath the mordant wit, theatrical swooning, silver screen quotations and wisecracking, Traupmann reveals a man terrified of what lies ahead.
Isabel Burton and Linda Nicholls-Gidley in Casey and Diana. Photo © Teniola Komolafe
Gabriel Alvarado gives a quietly haunting performance as the desperate Andre. As the hospice head nurse and a volunteer drawn into to Andre’s plight, Isabel Burton and Linda Nicholls-Gidley give us a poignant sense of what it is to serially devote yourself to the last weeks and days of someone’s life.
Lucy Miller, sporting magnificently period ‘big hair’, supercharges the stage as Thomas’s angry, emotionally conflicted sister Pauline.
Lib Campbell has relatively little to do as Diana but she’s an important – almost semi-divine – presence in a play that reminds us of the groundbreaking work HRH did to destigmatise those living with HIV/AIDS.
It’s safe to say that you’ll leave Casey and Diana quite touched at the very least – and with an inkling that a better-resourced staging might well have choked you up.
Casey and Diana plays in the Loading Dock Theatre at QTopia until 31 July.
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