Jacob Sparrow on his Aids crisis drama Sanctuary: 'there are still fights that need to be fought'
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Jacob Sparrow was inspired to write his award-winning debut play by the unlikely story of a plan to set up an Aids hospice in a tiny Suffolk village in the 1990s. Interview by Susan Mansfield
First-time playwright Jacob Sparrow credits a friend with giving him the push he needed to put pen to paper. “It was a little itch that I had been ignoring for a year or two,” says Sparrow, 32, who is a casting director by profession, but felt he didn’t have the confidence to write.
“I spoke to one of my good pals who is a musician who wrote a play, and she said: ‘You’ve just got to try, you’ve got to figure out if you can do it. If you just keep it in your head, in your notes app, it will become this shadow of a thing.’”
Instead it became Sanctuary, the inaugural winner of the Leodis Prize, a new award for a unrepresented writer offering a funded debut production at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Being selected as the “clear winner” out of 350 entries was, Sparrow says, “a really big shock”.
Sanctuary is set in a tiny Suffolk village, very like the one in which Sparrow grew up, inspired by the real-life discovery that, in the early 1990s, one resident had tried to set up a hospice for people with Aids in her home. Hearing the story made him see the place in a new light.
“As a queer person growing up there, it was difficult at times. There was no access to any form of representation, anyone who was queer, anyone who was a bit different. I left as soon as I could and didn’t go back for quite a long time.
“When my mum told me this story, it really interested me. I had made this decision about rural places, places that weren’t metropolitan, not being safe spaces for people who are queer or different. But if you look for it, there are voices, there are people who want to make a difference.”
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He set out to find people who had been involved with the hospice plan, or who had raised the objections against which it foundered, but he found silence. “That was interesting as well. In some cases, I was trying to get people to talk about a time in history when they might have made comments or actions of which they’re now ashamed.”
Sanctuary then took shape as a series of encounters between two imagined characters in a shifting time-frame: a young man who arrives in the village as the hospice idea is just beginning, and an older man who lives locally. Agent Daniel Hinchliffe, the founder of Leodis Talent, who set up the prize, described it as “a beautiful poignant play which made me cry about five times the first time I read it”.
Hinchliffe launched the Leodis Prize at last year’s Fringe, an award for an unpublished and unrepresented writer of any age and background. The winner receives a bursary of £2,000, a production at the Pleasance, a publication deal with Methuen Drama and representation from Leodis Talent.
He said: “We have some clients who have had successful routes from having a play at the Edinburgh Fringe which has transferred to London and has then toured internationally, and a couple that have been optioned for TV. I see it as a really good route for a new playwright, but no one supports new playwrights and produces their work.
“We’ve already got commercial producers interested in a future life for this play. Hopefully, this will be an annual event, and every year we’ll find a play as brilliant as this, bring it to London and continue to work on it.”
While he emphasises he was only one of a panel of judges which included the Pleasance’s Anthony Alderson, actor Tamzin Outhwaite and director Sam Yates, he says the play also resonated powerfully with him personally. “I grew up in the Aids crisis and that time was so impactful on my life. I grew up in fear of sex, because we were told that we’d die. It stopped me coming out - I didn’t come out until my mid-twenties.”
The play touches on a history which, he says, is in danger of being forgotten. “I was explaining the importance of Madonna to a younger person yesterday. She championed the gay community and talked about people with HIV and Aids, normalised it, and it was so important. The fact that kids don’t know Madonna did that is upsetting to me. I think we need to do more [plays] about Aids and HIV in this period.”
Hinchliffe believes Sanctuary “follows in a line” from plays such as Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Matthew López’s The Inheritance and Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. However, these deal with the American experience in the early 1980s, the intense early years of the epidemic. There is little drama looking at the more nuanced period which followed, when the development of drug therapies changed Aids from a death sentence into a manageable long-term condition.
Misinformation was rife, says Sparrow, who felt the long shadow of Aids when he came out as a teenager more than a decade after Hinchliffe. “Even in the early 2000s, my parents and their generation were so misinformed. I grew up being afraid of sex as well, and I find, as a man in my early 30s, I’m still working through that legacy. Now, most people just want to forget about all that stuff.”
He adds: “I think we, the queer community, want to say ‘Everything’s fine now’. But there are still fights that need to be fought, and there are still things we need to be asking for and championing and demanding. I think it’s so important to look back, in order to look forward.”
Sanctuary is at the Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, from 5-31 August (not 17th) at 4pm as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This feature was produced in association with the Leodis Prize
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