Gay Witch Sex Cult was quite the solo debut last year from Andrew Doherty, a folk-horror pastiche delivered in character as deluded estate agent Kaelan Trough. His follow-up attempts something similar, but trips itself up with a split satirical focus. Sad Gay Aids Play starts out with Doherty again in deliciously bumptious persona, smugly introducing his new drama chronicling the HIV crisis. We expect another genre spoof from an act with an adroit ear for send-up. But that’s not what we get – because the show doesn’t just send up sad gay Aids plays (such as they are), it tilts at Arts Council England funding as well.
The conceit is that Doherty wants to make a trashy comedy about reality TV, but ACE won’t fund it. If he wants their cash (and he needs it, because moneyed mum and dad have withdrawn their subsidy) he has to make something grittier, burlesquing his own marginal identity and exaggerating any personal trauma he may (or may not) have suffered. Hence the sub-Angels in America drama he’s now workshopping for us, and keeps adjusting according to live feedback from his ACE paymasters.
There’s no denying that the voguish vicissitudes of arts funding – and its bias against comedy – are ripe for mockery. But Doherty’s satanic ACE caricature misses the mark here. It also obliges our host to play himself, a hapless supplicant performer, rather than the self-congratulatory alter ego that so amused audiences last year, and at the start of this show.
There’s still plenty to enjoy in his play within a play, which rehashes gay life in the early 1980s. We see protagonist Harry Manlove, spurned by his homophobic mum, form a found family with friends including Freddie Mercury. It is, briefly, a carefree time – until Harry develops a cough, and starts wondering about “that last batch of semen I just took”. Doherty is a fantastic performer, and the comedy is potent in this mismatch of solemn subject matter with egotistical and ignorant actor/host. But when Doherty steers us away from that, towards his more effortful satire at ACE’s expense, the delight slightly dissipates.