The importance of “The Normal Heart”

The new National Theatre production of Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart (1985), directed by Dominic Cooke, is both moving and fascinating. Immediately it evokes the era of bewilderment and panic that surrounded the early recognition of AIDS in New York: it strikes notes of extreme pathos from the first. 

Today it seems that everyone knows about AIDS; it’s both enthralling and important to revisit a play about the period when nobody knew enough. Inevitably it also raises parallels to today’s coronavirus pandemic - ignorance, denial, shocking misinformation, and avoidance at governmental level were appalling factors then, in some ways more dismayingly than now.

But what Kramer’s play dramatises most importantly is the angry debate between two sides of radical gay politics. For one group, gay sexuality meant hard-won sexual liberation without persecution - and the right to promiscuity as a form of freedom and self-discovery. For another, liberation meant the preparedness to take responsibility, even though that meant renouncing sexual congress. In the days before the importance of condoms was known, when kissing alone might be the path to illness and death, AIDS forced this painful choice. Was sex something to be pursued or avoided?

Ned Weeks, the protagonist of “The Normal Heart”, is a close counterpart to Kramer himself, who fought at every level to achieve recognition for gay rights - and fought his own gay friends and colleagues to make them recognise that unprotected promiscuity was directly connected to mass death. On the face of it, this play is about a bygone chapter of sociology - but more profoundly it’s about choices most people, straight or gay, still make about many aspects of responsibility. It’s overlaid by the deeply affecting story of the relationship between Ned and Felix Turner, the brave and beautiful man who brings the redeeming qualities of love and faith to the previously hard-boiled Weeks: it’s Felix who becomes HIV positive, who has to ask whether Ned is the carrier, and who, despite pain and despair, is proud to marry Ned on his deathbed. 

It’s easy to cry at several points in this story, but yet better is how “The Normal Heart” creates drama about responsibility. Ned Weeks becomes a tragic hero in the way that Sophocles’s Antigone does, standing up against the authorities to change the world, single-handed if necessary. 

Cooke’s production, with a minimum of scenery (set by Vicki Mortimer, costumes by Lisa Duncan, lighting design by Paule Constable), occupies the Olivier Theatre, with the audience in the round; the actors are lightly amplified, but only occasionally is an echo distracting. The staging has a chronological precision for which I’m heartily grateful. To those of us who we’re adult in those 1981-1983 years, it’s distressing and enthralling to recognise what was happening to gay men then. Very few British people, of any sexuality, knew about this before 1984. “How did we not know then?” is the question that arises here, again and again, with anguish and anger.

Almost as valuable is the National Theatre’s printed programme. I watched the play wanting to read a history of AIDS: lo and behold, this programme includes an eight-page history of forty years of AIDS, with annual statistics that still appal. (I regret only that another programme essay, “AIDS - Lies and Conspiracy Theories” has not been adequately proof-read. It doesn’t take much, to give one example alone, to see that there are problems of sense in the sentence “In 1990, according to American right wing libertarian conspiracy theorist William Cooper, HIV was created by the CIA and injected into the African population during the 1970s through a smallpox epidemic eradication campaign, and into African Americans as a means of population control”. The next paragraph speaks of “Hopper”, which seems to be a misprint for “Cooper” or for “Hooper” in the preceding paragraph - but which?

Ben Daniels plays Ned with marvellous anger, charm, and vulnerability. His American accent is more or less perfect, so I’m sorry to say that his voice itself isn’t American: he places it with a backward resonance that’s British rather than transatlantic. Otherwise (I saw Tuesday’s preview performance) this is an exemplary production: unshowy, seamless, vividly human, urgent, with tenderness, humour, passion, and - oh! - pathos. All the leading characters are touchingly rounded: when you first encounter Dr Emma Brookner (Liz Carr), Felix (Dino Fetscher), Ben Weeks (Robert Bowman), you have no idea how they will evolve and enter your heart.

Everyone should see it; everyone should talk about it at length. It’s about recent history and about the world we live in today and about the choices we still make.

Olivier Theatre, SE1. www.nationaltheatre.org.uk To November 6.

Friday 1 October 

1: Ben Daniels (left) as Ned Weeks; Dino Fetscher (right) as Felix Turner. Photo: Helen Maybanks.

2: Liz Carr (left) as Dr Emma Brookner; Ben Daniels (right) as Ned Weeks. Photograph: Helen Maybanks.

3: Dino Festscher (Felix), left, with Ben Daniels (Ned), right. Photo: Helen Maybanks