Sanctuary review: tender Aids-era debut at Edinburgh
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- Sanctuary by Jacob Sparrow is the playwright's debut — an award-winning two-hander about young men living with HIV/Aids in 1990s Britain, running at Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, until 31 August.
- The play's setup is inspired by the real-life public furore around plans to build an Aids hospice in a Suffolk village, with characters ruefully citing villagers' fears that the hospice could contaminate their cows.
- Matthew Tennyson plays Michael, a young, HIV-positive and angry man, opposite Richard Cant as an older, unnamed character living with his partner in retirement; director Josh Seymour is praised for eliciting "delicately emotional performances."
- The review frames the production against the Edinburgh International Festival's revival of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," positioning Sanctuary as a smaller, more intimate portrait of the same era-defining crisis.
- Critics note the play's hopeful tone — Michael's "barely whispered hope for more life" and greater joy in loving as a gay man amid death — while flagging plot twists that "jar" and a warm ending that feels "tonally at odds" with the prejudice of the period.
Why it matters: For audiences tracking the Edinburgh festival's 2025 programme, Sanctuary offers a rare debut counterpoint to the high-profile Angels in America revival, tackling the same Aids crisis through a specifically British, community-level lens rooted in the Suffolk hospice controversy — a piece that lands emotionally but stumbles on contrivance, per the review.
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