The importance of being Oscar

So wrote one reader in response to the death, at the age of 36, of Oscar Moore, the journalist who for more than two years chronicled his battle with Aids and more in the pages of The Guardian - some time before the likes of John Diamond and Ruth Picardie recorded in print their own fight against terminal illness.

And that correspondent wasn't alone; other readers of the regular PWA (Person With Aids) column spoke of Moore's writing as promoting understanding and empathy for anyone with a terminal condition and praised its wit and intelligence. "He succeeded in exuding a sense of vitality in his writing - giving the impression of hope and almost of immortality," said one. "It was like getting letters from a friend," wrote another.

Now Moore's columns have been turned into a one-man play, PWA: The Diaries of Oscar Moore, by Malcom Sutherland, who is the same age as Moore was when he died, in 1996, 13 years after being diagnosed. "He dealt with a lot of taboos and it's extremely good writing. That's what really attracted me to it," he explains. "It's not just about HIV and gay men but about mortality, wit and courage under fire."

Sutherland, who has directed and adapted Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory for the West Yorkshire Playhouse, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, and Dale Peck's Fucking Martin for Gay Sweatshop, originally worked on Moore's diaries three years ago but felt the time wasn't right then for it to be performed. "With combination therapy, things were changing very quickly. And now we have people thinking that Aids is all over, but some treatments aren't working as well as people expected and they're not easy to take." Such treatments came too late for Moore, who was too ill to cope with the toxic drug cocktails by the time they became available.

Twenty years since Aids was first identified, it may have faded from the headlines but it is still very much with us. Last year there were 3,545 new cases of HIV reported in the UK - more than in any year since the epidemic began; elsewhere in the developing world, it is, of course, ravaging populations unable to afford the costly new drugs. Putting Aids in its wider context, the run of the play is accompanied by talks on Aids past, present and future.

For Sutherland, there is a sense of dÈj? vu, since he worked with the film-maker Derek Jarman, who died of Aids in 1994. Moore was also involved in the film world, as a writer and as editor of Screen International for the last five years of his life. Both Jarman and Moore lost their sight, their most precious faculty, in the final stages of illness. For Moore it may have been the final straw - he died a month after going blind. It probably

was not a coincidence, says Sutherland. "I think he thought it was time to go."

Moore is to be played in the show by Pip Torrens, who has just finished filming the Channel 4 drama Shackleton in the frozen wastes of Greenland, with Kenneth Branagh, and who was a contemporary of Moore's at Cambridge. He knew him "from a slightly awed distance" and recalls his playboy looks, his cutting a dash, and his cult status.

It was at Cambridge that Moore became involved in theatre when a series of his sketches was performed at the Edinburgh Festival; after graduating he became a theatre critic for Time Out and Plays and Players magazine. At around this time he also worked for a male escort agency (he was once hired as a birthday present for TV presenter Russell Harty), a fact that came to light in his partly autobiographical novel A Matter of Life and Sex, originally published under the pseudonym Alec F Moran (an anagram of roman ? clef). It caused something of a stir when it came out - and Moore was dubbed "an Orton of the Aids era" by the writer and critic Adam Mars-Jones.

He is, therefore, a daunting prospect for Torrens to live up to. "I can't, and wouldn't, attempt an impersonation of such a unique man," he says. "This is simply a performance of some of his finest moments in print, an hour or so in the company of an irrepressibly brilliant and hilarious mind, which I hope will do him justice. It's an account of the resilience needed from the most ordinary of us to deal with the inescapably huge issue of our own mortality.

"More than this, though, it is about walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and saying 'Sod you' to whatever it is that brings you there. And with panache, always panache; this was Oscar's greatest gift."

PWA: The Diaries Of Oscar Moore