Mark Ravenhill: My near death period

HIV, epilepsy, comas and memory loss haven't stopped Mark Ravenhill writing - in fact, they are what drive him

Wednesday March 26, 2008, The Guardian

Mark Ravenhill at the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival in 2007. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the narrative of Aids had a simple - if terrible - logic. You were diagnosed as HIV positive. Your immune system would erode. Then you'd progress within 10 years or so to fullblown Aids and an array of illnesses that would kill you.

This was the narrative I was presented with in 1990 when, at the age of 24, I was diagnosed as HIV positive. Looking back, I realise it was the terrible linearity of this narrative that drove me to start writing plays, and which gave my first full-length play, Shopping and Fucking, much of its momentum. With such intensity driving your life, what other form could your playwriting take?By 1997, I was on the new combination treatment; it was gradually strengthening my immune system. But one problem remained. Some time earlier, my brain had become infected with toxoplasmosis, a disease commonly seen in Aids patients. This had left a small scar, which began to cause epileptic seizures.

Sometimes, this led to near farcical scenes. One attack took place in front of Sir Ian McKellen and the entire corps de ballet of the Bolshoi in a Salford hotel lobby. Another time, in a crowded Waterloo restaurant, I was dining with a leading German playwright. I felt an aura coming over me. Wanting to warn him, I said: "Do you know what epilepsy is?" "Oh, yes," he said. "Most fascinating. It is a condition experienced by Dostoevsky. Indeed, I believe his entire aesthetic can be traced to the ..." At this point, I collapsed at the famous playwright's feet, and the lecture about aesthetics was cut short by panicking diners... [συνέχεια ΕΔΩ]