Review: RENT, Tom Stoppard Theatre ★★★★

Luke Sheppard’s revival of RENT is staged simply: a battered moving stage and some mismatched chairs in the centre of rows of on-stage seating. The band is above and the actors run through the on-stage audience. When actors sit in circles around the stage, it feels as though the on-stage audience are part of their community, too.

Around the stage, the walls add a further layer of tattered dilapidation, dotted with TV screens showing what Mark (Gaten Matarazzo) is filming.

Modelled on Marcello in La Bohème, Mark is an observer. An independent filmmaker, he is recording a time that we can now look back on in horror: when AIDS raced through communities, especially those who were gay or drug users. Matarazzo shows us that Mark’s documentary work is born out of love and grief: an urgent attempt to memorialise his peers before they are gone.

It is easy to forget just how ostracised people with AIDS were. The placards here remind us: “No tears for queers”. Jonathan Larson’s deliberate choice to include both gay and straight characters living with HIV or AIDS, and showing them within a loving social group, was radical.

After all, it was almost six years into the epidemic before, in April 1987, Diana, Princess of Wales, was filmed visiting London’s Middlesex Hospital and shaking hands with an AIDS patient without wearing gloves. The choice was so revolutionary that it was beamed around the world. People with AIDS were feared and often isolated.

RENT is set from Christmas Eve 1989 across the following year. As well as the AIDS crisis, Alphabet City in New York is plagued by gentrification. Property in an area which has been a home for immigrants, radicals, and low-income artists is being snapped up, cleaned up, and rented out at a cost its residents cannot afford.

Larson lived in the area and saw the impact of all these events, and the words he gave Mark could perhaps be his own: “How can you connect in an age where strangers, landlords, lovers, your own blood cells betray?” Much of the musical is rooted in a desperate reality that was unfolding all around him and killing those he loved.

The wrenching riot scene at the end of Act 1 is based on the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riot, which happened across the road from the Life Café (also real, and where some of RENT was written). Larson attended AIDS support group meetings with his friends. These inform the delicate song “Life Support” that begins with their names. We are not just watching a show; we are invited to bear witness to their lives. It would take a cold heart not to feel moved.

Billy Nevers as Tom Collins and Jeevan Braich as Angel capture the complete relationship range of tenderness, verve and fight. Watching Nevers nurse a fading Braich and then crumble when he is gone is profoundly touching. His reprise of “I’ll Cover You” is velvety in its plaintive pain.

Travis Ross as Roger and Alexa Lopez as Mimi exquisitely express their doomed vulnerability. Joaquin Pedro Valdes as Benny is a suitably upwardly thrusting social climber who cannot leave his roots and his former home behind.

In tying RENT loosely to the story of La Bohème, Larson recognises the similarities between Parisian bohemians with tuberculosis and poor New Yorkers with AIDS. This shines out particularly in “Christmas Bells”, where the force of the full ensemble reminds us there is “No room at the Holiday Inn” if you are not economically stable.

For those of us alive during this era, RENT is a valuable legacy piece. I attended with my daughter, for whom the 1980s and 1990s are the distant past. Larson’s work and this cast of RENT are doing an important service telling these stories anew to her generation, lest we forget. Their lives and struggles are immortalised here, just as those of the bohemians behind Puccini’s Parisians were before them. They deserve to be remembered.

Images: Pamela Raith

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