Alastair Curtis

Bio

Alastair Curtis is a writer and director based in London.

His debut short film Sweetheart premieres at Sundance Film Festival 2025, directed by Luke Wintour and starring Thomas Flynn, Ian Gelder, Kadiff Kirwan, Adrian Delacey, Olisa Odele, Ms Sharon Le Grand and Eben Figueiredo. It is produced by CAMP and executive produced by Alastair with Matthew López (The Inheritance), Marco Alessi (The Bower) and Luke Kelly (Matilda the Musical; Wonka). Alastair is currently developing a feature film adaptation, set amongst the queer criminal underground of eighteenth-century London.

He is the founder of The AIDS Plays Project, a campaign to revive and republish plays by queer writers who died of HIV/AIDS. He has directed plays by James Kirkwood, Robert Chesley, Harry Kondoleon and Charles Ludlam, starring Paul Hilton, Sharon Small, Nathan Armarkwei Laryea, Stuart Thompson, Mary Malone, Florence Keith Roach, Syrus Lowe, Ben Allen, Luca Kamleh Chapman, Dominic Holmes, Rakie Ayola, Rilwan Abiola Owokoniran, Adam Silver, Sue Gives A F*ck, and many others. He is an Associate Artist 2024-2026 at London Performance Studios and his work has been featured by the BBC, Frieze, HERO, AnOther, The Evening Standard and Financial Times, who wrote: “play by play, Alastair Curtis is reshaping the queer theatrical canon.”

He edited Christmas on Mars by Harry Kondoleon for re-publication with Polari Press, returning the play to print for the first time in forty years, with contributions by Don Shewey and Wendy Wasserstein. In 2025, he returns Colm Clifford’s ‘Reasons for Staying’ to the stage for the first time since 1986.

His writing on art and culture has appeared in Frieze, AnOther, The Economist, TANK, 1843, Prospect and The Observer, where he was shortlisted for the Anthony Burgess Arts Writing Prize. A graduate of the John Burgess Playwriting Course, he has been taught by playwrights including Tom Stoppard and now reads scripts for the George Devine Award and several theatres.

Press

“Alastair Curtis on Rediscovering Plays by Writers Lost to AIDS ” by Sam Moore, Frieze, September 8th 2023

The AIDS Plays Project, spearheaded by playwright Alastair Curtis, seeks to restage theatrical works created by writers lost to HIV/AIDS. In partnership with London Performance Studios, an initiative based in Bermondsey, Curtis launches the project with Charles Ludlam’s Camille (1973), performed by a cast of established actors and drag/nightlife performers.

"Alastair Curtis is reviving the forgotten plays of writers who died of HIV/AIDS” by Barry Pierce, HERO, December 6th 2023

Alastair Curtis is a writer, critic and occasional revivalist of so-called “lost” plays. A couple of years ago, he became interested in the generation of playwrights from the 1970s and 80s who we lost to HIV/AIDS. Many of them, such as Charles Ludlam, Harry Kondoleon, and Robert Chesley, were acclaimed in their time, but following their untimely deaths, their works have become somewhat forgotten. This is the injustice that Alastair rails against with The AIDS Play Project. In a series of one-off rehearsed readings, The AIDS Play Project revives these brilliant plays, placing them back in front of the audience they deserve.

London’s Queer Creatives: ‘We feel unsupported by the bastions of creativity like the National Theatre’ by Joe Bromley, The Evening Standard, May 30th 2024

Around a blue-lit, shrunken stage at the Penarth Centre last month, a bustling crowd of queers erupted into feverish, teary applause. A performance of Jerker, the 1986 play about phone sex during the Aids pandemic by the late San Franciscan playwright and activist Robert Chesley, had just concluded. It was the spot to be that Saturday night, and only the latest in a string of evenings put on by The AIDS Play Project, an organisation founded by playwright and director Alastair Curtis ‘to revive parts of our archive or history’, he explains. As of last June, Curtis has been elbow-deep in research, digging out old plays and manuscripts written by those who lost their lives to HIV/AIDS, ‘many of which, 40 years later, have been marginalised or relatively forgotten’. When he finds one, Curtis sets about organising a community rendition performed by drag stars, including Sue Gives a F*** and Sharon Le Grand, Olivier Award nominee actors such as Paul Hilton and Sharon Small, as well as blockbuster, upcoming names to know, Adam Silver, Dominic Holmes and Mary Malone. This momentum-building project is one of a number of grassroots, LGBTQIA+ performing arts set-ups currently bubbling across the city. Why? Curtis thinks people are turning their backs on the establishment.

‘The Aids Plays Project honours a lost generation of writers’ by Louis Wise, Financial Times, October 8th 2024

Reviving Kirkwood’s flop, as opposed to his megahit, might seem counterintuitive, but it’s of a piece with Curtis’s ambitions. The reading opens the second season of The Aids Plays Project, an initiative developed by Curtis that seeks to bring attention to forgotten plays and playwrights who died during the HIV/Aids epidemic; Kirkwood died in 1989 of Aids-related complications, aged 64. Last year’s season staged work by Charles Ludlam (Camille, a drag-heavy riff on La Dame aux camélias and La traviata), Harry Kondoleon (Christmas on Mars, a sharp four-hander about highly dysfunctional family relations) and Robert Chesley (Jerker, where phone sex turns into something intimate and heartbreaking).

“These are important writers from the margins of queer history,” says Matthew López, writer of the West End and Broadway hit The Inheritance and a mentor to Curtis. “Play by play, The Aids Plays Project is reshaping the queer theatrical canon.”