• Play Title: End of Transmission (radio drama)
• Author: Anita Sullivan
• First broadcast:  2022
• Running time: 56 minutes

Summary

End of Transmission is a radio drama by Anita Sullivan. The play was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in July 2022. Sullivan was honoured with the Tinniswood Award for this work.
Jude, the main character, is about to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. She’s had an unusual relationship for 25 years: unusual because her partner is HIV. At the moment, she is on a drug holiday and an old question re-emerges – who transmitted the virus to her? The play is presented as an extended dialogue between Jude and the newly awakened virus in her body. The virus, who is played by a male actor, tells the story of his own circuitous journey from Cameroon during WWI to Edinburgh in the 1980s and eventually to Jude. Like Scheherazade of Arabian Nights, the virus prolongs his tale because he knows that once he discloses the ‘culprit’s name,’ Jude will return to her drug regime.
The play addresses the themes of acceptance and resolution. Jude has dealt with the repercussions of a failed marriage and the impossibility of having children, but she still hasn’t let go of this one niggling question.

Ways to access the text: listening

The audio version of the play is available on the BBC Sounds website and also on YouTube. The running time is 56 minutes. Unfortunately, it is not possible to provide a source for the playscript. However, the piece was written specifically for radio so that is the best format.

Why listen to End of Transmission?

Sullivan’s radio play is witty, thoughtful, and comedic, However, there is a subtle, underlying message about HIV – it hasn’t gone away, you know. This is easy to forget in an age of antiretroviral medicines that suppress HIV. Other drugs like PrEP help to reduce the risk of catching the virus in the first place. With increasing levels of infection in Europe in recent years, the play alerts one to the legacy of a disease that still needs to be fought on a day-by-day basis. Sullivan considers how one may win a battle against an adversary who never truly goes away, a lifelong, pathological companion.

The radio drama is excellently written and has high-quality production values. The factual history of HIV, as recounted, contains some personal stories and necessary fictions to enhance the tale too. The overall result is gripping and quite distinctive.

Post-reading discussion/interpretation
_{What’s in a Name?}

In the first minutes of the drama, Jude receives voicemails and text messages wishing her a happy birthday. She is fifty now, a milestone in anyone’s life. Writer Anita Sullivan allows us to enter the mindset of this middle-aged, heterosexual, Scottish woman at a crossroads moment. The question mark should be about her future and maybe it is, but Jude looks obsessively toward the past. She has an ex-husband named Mark. The marriage failed due to the impossibility of them having any children. The impediment was not a fertility problem but the fact that Jude has HIV. Giving birth and passing on the virus were once inseparable. Now, the window of possibility for having children has closed because of Jude’s age. She faces the menopause, and she looks back at lost opportunities, barriers, and regrets. The old mantra of life begins at 40 (or 50) is not foremost in her mind. She seeks a name, a single name that will make sense of all those troubled years. An obsession with names is hardly a new phenomenon. When Juliet Capulet famously said, “What’s in a name” (Shakespeare 2.2.46), she meant that Romeo’s surname was meaningless because she was madly in love. She would not humour the idea that maybe he was the wrong man for her or the wrong type of man in general. The passion of youth made barriers seem silly. In contrast, Sullivan presents a woman burdened by shame and resentment who seeks to allocate blame. It is a depiction of a woman who has already paid a price, and yes, maybe that was also due in part to youthful foolishness. This essay considers the value of naming in such circumstances, along with the unforeseen repercussions.

The opening moments of End of Transmission are oddly reminiscent of the classic movie The Exorcist. A strange voice in a foreign tongue begins to speak from inside of Jude. It is like she is possessed by a demon, not a virus! The two stories have interesting overlaps. In the rite of exorcism, at least as practised by the Catholic Church, a priest needs to find out the demon’s name before it may be expelled successfully. Jude seeks to know who infected her: a name. The first step is to take a drug holiday. These so-called drug holidays were a frequent practice in the past when antiretroviral drugs were not as effective: a brief stoppage could help regain drug sensitivity. Jude takes a holiday from her medication so that an old enemy may be resurrected out of his sleepy submission. This act is done in desperation. Jude seeks resolution, but in the full knowledge that she can never fully expel her enemy.

Sullivan the playwright and Jude the character have two separate reasons to identify the enemy. For Sullivan, it is simply a way of making an invisible virus more relatable for an audience – “The artist and the dramatist must personify if they want to represent something immaterial instead of restricting themselves to showing its effects on visible things” (Webster 12). Thus, the virus takes on the character of a mysterious man. For Jude, the reason is slightly different. Jude’s mission is all about regaining a sense of control.

“Personification is a means of taking hold of things which suddenly appear startlingly uncontrollable and independent – the rolling stone, the blaze of the sunrise, the incurable disease, the irresistible desire, or the rule by which men conduct their political affairs.” (Webster 10 emphasis added)

In the play, ‘the virus’ morphs into an entity, a personality, and a verbose character. However, he has no actual name – just like the still-anonymous man who infected Jude. Various names flit endlessly through her mind as the possible culprit. Upon researching the Aids virus, one discovers that the virus’s name has had a similarly protean nature. Up until 1986, the CDC (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention) was linking the virus to just a few culprits: the infamous ‘”4-H list” of high-risk categories: HOMOSEXUALS, HEMOPHILIACS, HEROIN ADDICTS, and HAITIANS, and the sexual partners of people within these groups’ (Treichler 44). An individual name was almost superfluous when the disease had already become synonymous with a few specific population groups. In fact, at the very start of the Aids crisis, new medical cases arriving at New York hospitals were informally being termed “WOGS: the Wrath of God Syndrome” (52). Such a defamatory moniker is indicative of the stigmatization of the disease from the outset. In 1981, an article appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine where “The syndrome was provisionally called GRID: gay-related immunodeficiency” (53). Following a more enlightened 1982 conference in Washington, the name AIDS was selected for the disease because it had been accepted that not only homosexuals were getting sick, but heterosexuals too (53). However, not until 1986 was the virus itself given the official name of HIV, rather than the AIDS virus (57). In the radio drama, the virus speaks as a single entity, but his complex and far-stretching backstory makes his name a conundrum. One name is misleading since his names are legion.

From a psychological perspective, Jude wishes to reduce the overwhelming idea of a global killer to the more manageable name of one ex-lover. This phenomenon is seen in personal stories but also in scientific literature. Paula Treichler explains the importance of a name as follows.

“In the construction of scientific facts, the existence of a name plays a crucial role in providing a coherent and unified signifier – a shorthand way of signifying what may be a complex, inchoate, or little-understood concept.” (Treichler 55)

Valtorta et al explain that “Experts and laypeople alike routinely describe pathogens (e.g., viruses) and diseases with human-related terms” (1). Cancer is probably the best-known example. As a society, we have become familiar with the idea of cancer as an enemy that invades a person’s body and must be fought off (1). When spoken of in this manner, a patient can better come to terms with their own response to a disease. But the HIV virus is less conducive to submission by simply naming it; in fact, it complicates matters.

The virus still carries a wealth of stigma, regardless of the name one finally attributes to it. For instance, when research first suggested that the virus originated in Africa, “some “geographic buck-passing” took place among the African countries themselves (Rwanda and Zambia say AIDS originated in Zaire, Uganda says it came from Tanzania, and so on)” (Treichler 56). This is a disease that has been steeped in prejudice since its first detection. As Treichler writes, “AIDS exists at a point where many entrenched narratives intersect” and “it is extremely difficult to resist the lure, familiarity, and ubiquitousness of these discourses” (63). This is evident in Sullivan’s play because Jude actively singles out former sexual partners who are bisexual, gay, or drug users. She sees these men as the most likely offenders. In contrast, Jude herself does not fit the stereotypical profile of an HIV-positive person. Therefore, she tries to rid herself of the stigma by naming and shaming the one who likely gave her this unkillable bug. Michael Kleine writes about how we have historically dissociated ourselves from the socially constructed imagery of disease: we “associate it with an “other,” a patient who is not us and who becomes a kind of symbolic substitute for the disease itself” (Kleine 124). There is an obvious paradox for Jude. She is actively re-stigmatizing men who are the same men with whom she had consensual sexual relations. Like the African countries that emphasised their boundaries as the apparent markers between healthy and diseased territories, Jude attempts to disassociate herself from her HIV-positive former partner. This is borne out of the shame of association.

Jude sees herself as a victim, thus, an endpoint for the virus, rather than a link in a long chain of ongoing infections. The issue of responsibility is contentious. Treichler poses the crucial question about whether one would prefer an illness linked to a person’s identity and therefore containable through that person’s self-control, or an external disease that may be treated strictly as a medical problem (47). Jude actively seeks to blame someone for her status, so she links the disease to identity: just not her identity. Regarding the topic of sexually transmitted diseases in general, Treichler quotes Bryan Turner who wrote – “the diseased are seen not as “victims” but as “agents” of biological disaster” (64). Interestingly, Jude also chooses to anthropomorphize the virus, so it presents as something capable of conscious, rational thought like a person. This is the man’s voice that we hear addressing Jude. The results of numerous studies suggest “that anthropomorphism creates an external agent to which to attribute health outcomes, diluting the person’s role and the perceived efficacy of one’s own behavior” (Valtorta 2). In recent studies about the coronavirus, Valtorta et al found “that attributing a mind to a virus is not linked to its perceived severity but to conditions supporting a diffusion of responsibility” (8). Jude views the as-yet-unknown man who infected her as a destructive agent who marred her life. Additionally, the virus itself becomes a substitute for that man and therefore needs to be given an identity too. Jude’s thought processes, as outlined, serve to build protective barriers around her identity.

The great irony of the entire scenario is that people’s natural inclination to anthropomorphise non-human entities like viruses “is often used to gain better and simpler understanding of complex scientific knowledge” (Valtorta et al 1). Thus, the default mechanism we use to make things more understandable also serves to unburden us of blame, even though this was never the conscious intention. Michael Kleine highlights two other very counterintuitive trends that concern discussions around disease. First, there is the manner in which healthy people treat those who are infected.

“The analysis of lay discourse has tended to uncover linguistic strategies that distance the disease from the healthy speaker/writer in terms of both place and time, and which categorize and dehumanize the AIDS “patient.” (Kleine 123)

Jude participates in just such a linguistic strategy when she attempts to trace the history of her own infection. She guesses the origin to be a chain of infection that came from three promiscuous gay/bisexual men: Jim (movie guy) to Vince (‘uncle’ Vinny) to Kenny (weekend liaison). But this turns out to be false. The time and place where Jude got infected was ‘safe’ in her own view. In contrast to lay discussions, Kleine explains that virologists tend “not to distance and objectify AIDS, but to bring it close and, ironically, to humanize the microscopic virus that is the object of study” (124). This often helps scientists to understand the virus better and make key research breakthroughs. It is a push and pull scenario; the actual Aids patient is treated as a social pariah whereas the virus is allotted a personality by both the infected person and the virologists researching the virus. The universally shared aim of simply understanding a deadly virus results in a complex psychological minefield.

In the radio drama, Jude assumes the role of an amateur detective with the virus in the role of the prime suspect. The discussion that they engage in resembles an interrogation. She hopes the virus will snitch and provide a vital name. Valtorta et al explain that “Anthropomorphism fosters teleological thinking at the expense of cause-effect explanations” (2). Consequently, Jude seeks to track down a man who has, at worst, been criminally negligent, instead of a man who is a fellow victim. There have been many high-profile court cases over the years against HIV-positive people who failed to disclose their status and subsequently infected their partner(s). Framing Jude’s quest as a thriller is not so conspicuous. For instance, Kleine refers to a groundbreaking article in Scientific American entitled ‘”AIDS in 1988″ [which] can be read as a fascinating detective story in which Gallo and Montagnier portray themselves as super sleuths on the track of a mysterious and elusive “cytopath” (cell killer)’ (128). Dr. Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier, a virologist, were the two scientists who discovered the HIV virus, which in turn made it possible to create a blood test for the virus. In contrast, when Jude acts as a detective in search of her own past, it turns up nothing but prejudices and falsehoods.

The play reveals that Toby, one of Jude’s first steady boyfriends, was the man who infected her. She never even considered this a possibility since they had used condoms, plus the fact that she associated no risk with a heterosexual man. Tactics which work for virological research are shown to be counterproductive for laypeople.

At the opening of the drama, Jude describes her body as a black box that holds the record of the cause of a disaster. Her quite understandable search for a name results in a line-up of prime suspects whose lifestyles are judged to have had an impact on her ‘normal’ life. She is attempting to relegate blame as a catharsis. Her life has been marred and she seeks a way in which to discharge this emotional baggage, chiefly anger. When Toby’s name is revealed, Jude must face the realisation that all victims are blameless. After all, he is a mirror image of her – middle class, ‘safe,’ and heterosexual. A virus passed on via sexual contact is indiscriminate, and that is the key lesson. The virus itself is a repository for millions of names. The revelation of a single name is not a moment of cleansing exorcism, which Jude had expected. The true victory for Jude is contained in her knowledge that she need not fear the virus anymore since it can be controlled with medication. In the end, a crazed search for a single name is replaced by the comfort held in one vital word: untransmittable.

Works Cited

Kleine, Michael. “Metaphor and the Discourse of Virology: HIV as Human Being.” The Journal of Medical Humanities, vol. 15, no. 2, 1994, pp.123-139.

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. The Folger Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet – Entire Play | Folger Shakespeare Library

Sullivan, Anita. End of Transmission. BBC Sounds, http://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0018ws9

Treichler, Paula A. “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification.” October, vol. 43, 1987, pp. 31–70. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3397564.

Valtorta RR, Orabona N, Paladino MP. “On the indirect link between virus anthropomorphism and health behavior: Evidence from the pandemic.” Acta Psychologica, vol. 243, 2024, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691824000325.

Webster, T. B. L. “Personification as a Mode of Greek Thought.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 17, no. 1/2, 1954, pp. 10–21. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/750130.