SCENE | A Historic Royal Visit – Arts Club Cares for 'Casey and Diana'

"This is like the homosexual version of the Make-A-Wish Foundation!"

Casey House / October 25, 1991

South Granville—Arts Club Theatre Company stages North Vancouver playwright Nick Green's acclaimed, fictionized AIDS crisis dramedy, Casey and Diana, inspired by the late Princess Diana's historic 1991 Toronto visit to Casey House, Canada's first freestanding hospice caring for people (primarily gay men at the time) dying from the HIV/AIDS virus. A real tearjerker of a stage play that premiered at the 2023 Stratford Festival, it's a powerful tale that lives up to the actual impact the event had, destigmatizing the epidemic and humanizing those afflicted.

Andrew Kushnir's direction here juggles a wide variation of tones from sharp, biting sarcasm about '90s pop culture to many brutal truths about the impending death sentence AIDS was and a constantly looming sense of dread. Despite this, Casey and Diana celebrates the joy of caring for your loved ones living and dying with dignity.

A lively Damien Atkins carries the bulk of the show as the brutally cutting Thomas as he speaks to an imagined version of Diana (an angelic Lindsey Angell) based on her much-worshipped public persona that we all envisioned at the absolute peak and height of her worldwide fame as an ambassador for the sick and displaced.

Alen Dominguez and Nora McLellan / Photo credit | Mark Halliday

We follow a week near the end of Thomas' life before the Princess of Wales' influential real-life & as he adjusts to a new wheelchair-bound roommate, Andre (Alen Dominguez). Their everyday interactions with each other, estranged family members, and the hardworking staff follow an amusing yet heartbreakingly frank depiction of the stigma of suffering from the virus that absolutely ravaged the gay community.

It's a remarkable play full of earnest, sincere performances that delights with many moments of genuinely heartfelt laughter, just as it devastates and sublimates our expectations of another weepy 1990s-era AIDS drama. Furthermore, it highlights well a particularly noteworthy moment in Canadian history and our earlier acceptance of the LGBTQ community through those who did the unglamorous hard work caring for the ill every day through some of the toughest emotional conditions.

Casey and Diana works impressively well as both a combined piece of real history and fictionalized drama. It runs until May 25th live on the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage.


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